No one knows when it first began, but reports of angelic actions at Kmarts across North America are flooding in.
For instance, on December 13th, a woman in her mid-forties at a Kmart in Indianapolis paid off the balance owing on layaway orders for as many as fifty people. A young single father, wearing dirty clothes and worn-out boots, stood in line at the Kmart layaway counter with three small children. He wanted to pay a little toward his bill, even though he couldn’t pay it all before Christmas. Just then, a mysterious woman stepped up and told him, “No, I’m paying for it.” He just stood there and looked at her, and then at the cashier, before asking if it was a joke. When told that it wasn’t, she was actually going to pay his bill, he fell to his knees and broke down in tears.
On her way out of the store, that angel handed out fifty dollar bills to people, and paid for two carts of toys for a woman standing at a cash register. Edna Deppe, Indianapolis store assistant manager, told Associated Press, “She did it in the memory of her husband, who had just died. She said she wasn’t going to be able to spend it, so she wanted to make people happy with it.” The woman did not identify herself, and asked only for people to “remember Ben”, an apparent reference to her late husband.
Deppe, who’s worked in retail for 40 years, has never seen anything like it. “It’s like angels fell out of the sky and appeared in our stores,” she said. However, most of the angels are doing their giving secretly. Dona Bremser, an Omaha nurse, was working when a Kmart employee called to tell her that someone had paid off the $70.00 balance on her layaway account. In it, nearly $200.00 in toys for her 4-year-old son. “I was speechless,” Bremser said. “It made me believe in Christmas again.” Dozens of customers, in almost every state, have received similar calls, and more are made every day.
