At Christmas, poor kids in rich Maryland suburb have a secret Santa

As she entered Target, green reusable shopping bag slipped over her shoulder, Eileen Ellis glanced at the picture of the wish list on her phone. The girl's clothing size was 6/7; shoe size 12. Under "gift suggestions," a social worker had handwritten: "Anything — She has very little."

Ellis, by contrast, has a lot: a lovely green townhouse in Northern Virginia, a well-paying job as a software sales director, an architect husband and two caring sons, the youngest of whom had just finished his tennis lesson and was now trying to keep up as Ellis purposefully steered the red cart through the crowded store.

"So you know how we usually get three things for each child?" asked Ellis, training her blue eyes on 11-year-old Ian. "This year we’re going to get five for Maylin."

The pair stopped in the girl's clothing department and dropped a flowered puffer jacket into the red cart, then aimed for the toy aisles. In went a Barbie Kitty Condo playset, a Crayola Light Up tracing pad and a Lego Friends recycling truck.

By the time they reached the self-checkout an hour later, the cart was crammed with enough toys and clothing to fulfill the holiday wishes of eight children in the three families they’d volunteered to help.

Later, Ellis would wrap it all in bright paper and, about 8 a.m. on the frigid Wednesday before Christmas, don her glittery Mrs. Claus coat and head with her two sons to a luxurious beige brick home in Potomac, Md. There, she’d find Tamara Greenspan, a lean, blonde woman in ripped blue jeans and ankle socks, sprinting around the sprawling first floor connecting gift givers with scores of numbered shopping bags and sacks. Outside in the circular driveway, dozens of Montgomery County police officers would be filling a large white box truck, like so many serious, oversized elves.

Over two decades, the Greenspans’ home has become the hidden headquarters of a grass-roots network that has delivered holiday gifts to thousands of needy children, all in a county where country-club affluence masks pockets of deep poverty.

Even as the state's largest concentration of millionaires call Montgomery County home, the poverty rate has grown by 66 percent, from 5.1 percent to 8.5 percent, since Greenspan began her holiday gift drive in 2000. Inflation and the soaring cost of housing keep swelling the ranks of the near-poor and the desperate.

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Over the next five hours, Ellis crisscrossed the county in her white Toyota Highlander hybrid doing her small part to, if not bridge the gap, spread some material cheer. On her list of addresses: a blighted mobile home park in Germantown, where she hoped to greet Maylin's mother at the door.

Ellis had heard about Greenspan's homegrown holiday operation — known as KINDH, or Kids in Need During the Holidays — even before she transferred from Oracle's San Francisco office in 2017 to join the software company's sales team in Reston, Va. The two women soon met at a meeting of the firm's women's leadership group, headed by Greenspan. Ellis had been active with unhoused people in California and was looking to be of use again. Her new colleague asked whether she would like to sponsor a family for the holidays.

In some ways, Greenspan is the quintessential hard-charging Washington working mother — the one who plans the office birthday and going-away parties, serves on the work committees, volunteers with the PTA, all the while raising children and excelling on the job. Her own clothes closet might be chaos — or so says her 22-year-old daughter, Morgan — but if Tamara Greenspan wants to make something happen, it damn well will.

She won't tell you that herself.

"She's a very generous person in every aspect of her life, but she is also very humble. You don't know these things about her until you become friends with her," said Michelle Cahn, who met Greenspan when they were young moms in a Potomac playgroup.

Greenspan is also a Washington networker of the most benevolent kind, Cahn and others say. That and her sales skills have helped speed her rise up the ladder at Oracle to group vice president and general manager overseeing federal government sales in the United States and Canada.

"If she knows someone who can help you, she will connect you," said Cahn, a Xerox vice president who targets a $3,000 company donation toward KINDH, plus all the label printing the nonprofit needs.

Greenspan started KINDH 22 years ago with just a handful of female co-workers. At the time, she said, they were young professionals unencumbered by children. Greenspan suggested they find a way to give back to families at the holidays. They wound up adopting 10 families.

"We just wanted to do something in the office to help people. That's all there was to it," said Greenspan, 55.

Her husband, Scott, takes care of the business side — the accounting, IRS 501(c)(3) filings, the website — and, compulsively tidy, keeps the couple's two giant granite kitchen islands clutter-free and the floors cleared of gift-wrapping detritus once the charity launches for the season on Nov. 1. "The mess drives him crazy," his wife admitted.

While KINDH winds up delivering mostly Christmas gifts, the charity is inclusive of all faiths and draws deeply on the couple's Jewish network, which includes their synagogue, Temple Beth Ami in Rockville.

Marcie Blackman met Tamara Greenspan when their children were on the same soccer team. Soon, the Bender Jewish Community Center in Rockville, where Blackman works, began adopting families. Then three years ago, Blackman's Gaithersburg neighborhood signed up as a KINDH donor, and this year is providing gifts to 33 children. Her neighbors prefer the connection with families they know something about.

"We can see where these gifts are going to," she said. "It's very heartwarming."

Social workers with the county's Head Start program suggested roughly half of this year's 264 families, which include many refugee, migrant and homeless children. Each wish list includes the child's first name, age and what they hope to receive. Greenspan finds people to adopt any latecomers straight up through delivery day.

The largesse spills over into the rest of the year, with KINDH contributing dozens of winter coats to the public schools’ "coat closet," replenishing school lunch accounts, paying off gas bills, donating beds. The fact that the charity has no overhead is a point of pride: "It's the community helping the community," said Tamara, whose three children — the youngest now at Churchill High — have grown up helping.

When the pandemic struck in 2020, Greenspan refused to shut down. "I just thought, ‘There's no way we’re not going to do this,’" she said.

She enlisted the Montgomery County police to take the gifts to social services headquarters in Rockville, where an armada of school buses ferried the packages to outdoor locations so social workers and Greenspan could deliver them into waiting hands.

The police have been delivering most of the gifts for KINDH since Greenspan reached out to them about five years ago, said Lt. Kevin Parker, deputy director of the community engagement division for Montgomery's department. Who better to hunt down far-flung addresses than three dozen officers who cruise the county every day? The effort is joyful.

"The officers are like everybody else — they were children once," Parker said.

On Wednesday, police officers were out front loading the truck, joined this year by some members of the county's fire and rescue department. Inside, the home's wide front hallway and adjacent rooms were filled with mounds of colorfully wrapped packages and roaming volunteers. Greenspan's commanding voice could be heard amid the buzz.

Ellis and her sons, Ian and 15-year-old Bryce, both wearing Santa hats, had joined the throng, searching for the numbered shopping bags full of donations for the three extra families they had agreed to add to their delivery route. Finally, Highlander loaded, they drove off.

Ellis steered the Highlander through the labyrinth of the trailer park in Germantown. Her destination was a small mobile home with pale-green aluminum siding.

Maylin, a slight child with wispy dark hair and solemn brown eyes, had just left for school with her father after he had come to visit with her. Inside the trailer, her mother, Lilian, had been crying as she waited for the gift delivery.

"I have a very long story," she said through an interpreter, pushing her waist-length brown hair away from her damp face.

She and Maylin had arrived by foot and bus from her native Honduras to the Mexican border about four months ago. This wasn't her first time making the trek. She’d been living in the United States but left to care for her 33-year-old son, who died in February. She showed a reporter and her social worker the papers she had been given by U.S. immigration officials requiring her to check in for her asylum hearing. She had no idea how she would survive until then. Maylin's father had just left her, she said. She did not have a job and spoke little English. Maylin cries when there is no cereal to eat, Lilian said.

"What she wants for Christmas is very hard to obtain," Lilian said. "Every day she wants her father to come back and be the same as he used to be."

The night before, Maylin could not sleep. She was stroking the pillow on the side of the bed where her father had slept. "Mami, I have a wish," she told her mother at midnight. "I want my father to come back to me."

As Lilian spoke, the family dog, Fairy, began yapping sharply on the front porch.

Ellis rapped on the door. Behind her, Bryce and Ian carried two Christmas shopping bags. Lilian rose from her chair to greet them, and Ellis stepped inside.

"Hello! You must be Lilian," Ellis called out brightly in her glittery Mrs. Claus coat. She reached out to hug the woman as Bryce and Ian entered bearing the gifts for Maylin.

"Thanks so much," Lilian said softly.

"You’re welcome," Ellis exclaimed.

Four hours and five families later, Ellis finally steered the Highlander home to Reston. Over the next three days, Ellis would finish wrapping gifts for her husband and sons.

On Christmas Eve, Bryce would play "O Little Town of Bethlehem" on his violin, and Ian would narrate the annual Christmas pageant at St. Anne's Episcopal Church. Afterward, they would dine with their parents over a charcuterie board, in homage to their father's Hungarian roots.

On Christmas Eve in the Germantown trailer, Lilian planned to pull the shopping bags from their hiding place on a closet shelf. There was no Christmas tree this year. Her gift would be to see Maylin smile as she opened her presents.