‘Tears of joy’: Single mom in Socastee ‘overwhelmed’ by response to Christmas request
Ezekiel Davis couldn’t stop staring at the stack of gifts, piled high enough to nearly hide the entire Christmas tree they surrounded.
“I get all the grey ones,” the 4-year-old said, smiling at his reflection in the shiny silver wrapping paper.
The grey ones aren’t all actually for him, his mother Shanita Davis pointed out, but nothing could wipe the smile off the face of the youngest of her five kids.
Ezekiel, Brushi’a, 6, Eli, 7, Emorej, 13, and Shenell, 14, are all looking forward to finding out what’s in these boxes that have been arriving at their Socastee apartment one-by-one and two-by-two for weeks.
Just a few months earlier, Shanita Davis wasn’t sure how she was going to provide any gifts for her children. She moved to the Myrtle Beach-area with them in early 2018, and they spent more than a year in a hotel before she able to secure housing.
She was unemployed for several months this year, she said, primarily due to Horry County Schools’ COVID-19 quarantine guidelines consistently forcing her to stay home with one of her children. Davis just recently started working again at a nearby Walgreens, she said.
“It’s scary because your kids depend on you, and I’m all they have,” she said. “When it comes to the holidays, it’s constantly, ‘Mommy can you get me this? Mommy, can you get me that?’ You’re afraid to tell them no because you can’t afford it, so you just say, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’”
Davis ended up asking for help on the Nextdoor app, which allows users to connect directly with neighbors, and asked if anyone knew organizations that could help a single mother with Christmas gifts.
Some directed her to organizations like Angel Tree and local churches, but others just started sending gifts to her apartment, anonymously, with her children’s names on them.
“I was just overwhelmed, tears of joy most definitely,” Davis said. “I couldn’t be happier because my kids are happy.”
She said she’d never needed to ask for help like this before, and she was worried about what others on social media might say.
“I did have a little bit of backlash ... (from) negative people making me feel like I was small and couldn’t do my job as a mother for my kids,” Davis said. “But I was just like if I can’t do it for them, then who can I do it for?”
The generosity of others definitely outweighed the negative comments in the end, she said, and she wants everyone that sent gifts to know how much she and her kids appreciate them.
“They’re just ready to open them up,” she said, as Ezekiel and the others nodded vigorously in agreement.
This story was originally published December 24, 2021 at 6:58 AM.
