From his toy-cluttered Brooklyn apartment, the man in
the red suit was making his list and checking it twice. But he made no
distinction between naughty or nice: Every child on it would receive a
gift from this Santa Claus.
For the children whose toys floated away during Superstorm Sandy,
Michael Sciaraffo is playing the role of a real-life Saint Nick. Every
afternoon and night, he stuffs his red sack to the brim with presents
and heads out to storm-ravaged homes, personally delivering new toys to
awestruck little kids whose play rooms were destroyed by floodwaters.
And with less than a week before Christmas, his "Secret Sandy Claus
Project" is keeping him very busy.
"Between the requests coming in for personal visits as well as the
influx of donations, it's been a full-time job," said Sciaraffo, a
31-year-old political consultant. "And kudos to Santa, because I don't
know how he pulls it off every year."
There's hardly any room to sit in his tiny apartment, where boxes of
toys are piled on tables and all over the floor. He spends most of the
day keeping track of toy requests and donations that are pouring in by
the hundred from people who know children affected by the storm. At
first, Sciaraffo began jotting down the requests on Post-it notes, but
as demand steadily grew he created a spreadsheet and taped it to the
wall.
The list reads like an inventory for a toy store. A Playskool swing
for 2-year-old Jacob. A Disney Fairies makeup set for 5-year-old
Charlotte. Then there are countless robots and footballs and baby dolls
arranged by age and gender, awaiting assignment to a specific child.
"The goal was to match up each child with a toy that they liked or
asked Santa for for Christmas," Sciaraffo explained. "We basically tried
to pair them up with toys I had in stock."
The charitable enterprise grew out of a Sandy donation outreach
effort that Sciaraffo had been spearheading for weeks in the wake of the
storm, drumming up donations of clothing and food through Facebook. As
the holidays approached, he realized that lots of children would be
without their toys this year.
And with their parents preoccupied with the drudgery of storm
repairs, many children probably might not even get to sit on Santa's
lap. So he decided to fill that gap himself.
"When I was a kid, my toys were very important to me," Sciaraffo
said. "That's their security blanket, so to speak. I couldn't sit home
and do nothing."
Donations are coming by the truckload from all over the country,
fueled by his Facebook page. And Sciaraffo has received elf-like help
from fellow New Yorkers like Sean Turk, a father of three from Queens
who has raised more than $2,000 from his community and has been filling
toy requests at local stores.
"I started it with $500 of my own," Turk said, "and then people just started contributing."
On a recent rainy afternoon, Sciaraffo pulled on his white wig and
beard and drove out to weather-beaten Belle Harbor, a town on the
Rockaway peninsula. His first stop: the darkened oceanfront home of
Elizabeth Sampol, who was waiting upstairs with her 11-month-old
daughter, Ella.
"Ho, ho, ho," he shouted. "Merry Christmas!"
Ella gazed up at him and smiled as Sciaraffo handed her a toy duck.
Sandy struck just after her first birthday party and destroyed all of
her new gifts when the basement flooded.
"As you can see from the outside of the house and the inside of the
house, it's been a disaster," said Elizabeth Sampol, who has been living
in a FEMA-funded hotel room for several weeks with her family while
their home is repaired. "And we haven't had time to take her to go see
Santa Claus or to do anything that we would want to do for her first
Christmas that actually matters."
Sampol said she was amazed when she learned about Sciaraffo's project.
"He contacted me and he told me how he's been going around giving out
gifts," she said. "And I was so happy that someone would do this in his
free time."
A few blocks away, 4-year-old Sophie Creamer waited excitedly by the
front door as she caught sight of Sciaraffo coming down the street. And
when he handed her a brand-new Barbie doll, she clutched it to her chest
and wouldn't let go.
"It's all gutted. We don't have a basement," said her mother, Lori Creamer. "So she lost all of her toys."
If all goes according to plan, Sciaraffo is hoping to deliver presents to nearly 1,000 children in the coming days.
As he hoisted his sack of toys over his shoulder, heading off to
another delivery, the rain stopped and a rainbow cut a path across the
sky. He took it as a sign of good luck.
"You don't see that every day," he said, grinning as his beard slipped down his face a little. "Amazing."
In this Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2012 photo, Elizabeth Sampol holds her daughter Ella, 14 months, who received a toy from Michael Sciaraffo, as Santa, in the Belle Harbor neighborhood of the Queens borough of New York. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
