Story by Chris Graham
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Tim Spears saw two needy children one Christmas 27 years ago.
From a humble effort to help those two enjoy a decent Christmas, an effort that has brought Yuletide cheer to more than 7,000 youngsters since was born.
“I went to my band – we were playing on the road – and I asked them, Would it be OK if we just took the money from just one job and gave it to these two children and bought them shoes and toys and coats. Because they just weren’t going to have a Christmas. The following year, we started doing a couple of shows – and then after that it really escalated into raising some big money for these children,” said Spears, the owner of Tim Spears Music City in Downtown Waynesboro and a country-music musician and singer.
The Tim Spears Christmas Fund will take more than 100 Greater Augusta-area children on a shopping trip on Dec. 16.
Each child gets $50 to spend on gifts – which “in this day and time is not a great big amount of money,” Spears said, but the value of the money to the kids involved is worth millions.
“One thing that we do is we try to instill in the children that somebody out there who doesn’t even know them cares about them. And then secondly we realize that without this fifty dollars, they probably would not have any kind of Christmas at all,” Spears said.
You can still help out with this year’s Christmas shopping experience.
To learn more about how to donate to the Christmas Fund or to donate your time as a shop-erone on Dec. 16, access www.timspears.com on the World Wide Web.
Chris Graham is the executive editor of The Augusta Free Press.
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