Families facing hard times this Christmas are getting some unexpected relief in the form of “Secret Santas” who have been popping up all over the U.S., mostly at Kmart stores, where they secretly pay off the layaway accounts for cash-strapped families.

The Associated Press (AP) is reporting that the anonymous do-gooders have struck at Kmart stores in Michigan, Indiana, Nebraska, Montana and Iowa, paying off thousands of dollars worth of layaway accounts, usually leaving just a few dollars on the tab to keep the account in the store’s system.

“It just gives you a warm feeling,” said Lori Stearnes, 53, after a Secret Santa paid off the $250 layaway bill she racked up to buy Christmas gifts for her grandchildren. “With all the things going on the world, just to have someone do that is so, I don’t know, it’s hard to put into words.”

When an employee of the Omaha Kmart called to say someone had just paid off most of her account,Stearnes thought it was joke. The Good Samaritan did not leave a name and paid all but $58 of her bill.

A similar incident occurred at a Kmart store in Indianapolis where a young father wearing worn out boots stood in line with his three young children at the layaway counter to make a payment on the gifts he was struggling to pay off before Christmas. Just then, a mysterious woman stepped up to the counter and said she was going to pay the bill.

“She told him, ‘No, I’m paying for it,'” recalled Edna Deppe, assistant manager at the store in Indianapolis. “He just stood there and looked at her and then looked at me and asked if it was a joke. I told him it wasn’t, and that she was going to pay for him. And he just busted out in tears.”

Before she left the store, the woman, described as being in her mid-40’s, paid the layaway bills for as many as 50 people. On her way out of the store, she handed out $50 bills and paid for two carts full of toys for a woman in line at the cash register.

“She was doing it in the memory of her husband who had just died, and she said she wasn’t going to be able to spend it and wanted to make people happy with it,” Deppe said.

The woman refused to identify herself and only asked people to “remember Ben,” an apparent reference to her husband.

Deppe, a retail worker for 40 years, said she never saw anything like it.

“It was like an angel fell out of the sky and appeared in our store,” she said.

Dona Bremser, a nurse from Omaha, said she was at work when a Kmart employee called to say someone had paid off the $70 balance remaining on the nearly $200 worth of toys she purchased for her four year-old son. 

“I was speechless,” Bremser said. “It made me believe in Christmas again.”

A Secret Santa in Missoula, Montana spent $1,200 to pay down the balances of six layaway orders that were about to be returned to the store’s inventory because of late payments. One of the recipients of this random act of kindness was a mother who was at Seattle Children’s Hospital where her son was being treated for an undisclosed illness when she received the call. Store workers said after she heard the news, she called out to the nurses, “We’re going to have Christmas after all!”

In another Kmart in Plainfield Township, an unknown man paid all but 40 cents of Roberta Carter’s $60 layaway. Carter, a mother of eight from Grand Rapids who was been struggling to find a full-time job, said she cried upon hearing the news.  Thanks to a Secret Santa, “My kids will have clothes for Christmas,” she told the AP. 

Angie Torres, a mother of four children under the age of 8, was standing in line at the layaway counter in a Kmart in Indianapolis when she was told that the woman next to her was paying off her account.

“I started to cry. I couldn’t believe it,” said Torres, who wasn’t sure she’d be able to pay off the account. “I was in disbelief. I hugged her and gave her a kiss.”

According to the AP, the phenomenon seems to have begun in Michigan before spreading across the country. 

“It is honestly being driven by people wanting to do a good deed at this time of the year,” said Salima Yala, Kmart’s division vice president for layaway.

Although it’s mostly been in Kmart stores, good Samaritans have also visited Wal-Mart stores in Joplin, Missouri and Chicago. Kmart representatives say they have nothing to do with the Secret Santas and believe their stores are the most frequent target of the good deeds because they are one of the only large discount stores that offers layaway year-round.

But it doesn’t really matter what kind of store or where it might be located. All that matters in this story is the fact that the Christmas spirit is alive and well in the USA!

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