Christine Bae has spent over $10,000 on more than 3,000 gifts since last Christmas. “This is the season of giving, and it makes me feel great,” she says.
In early fall of the year before, Christine Bae took her young son and daughter to the Flying Tiger Copenhagen store in a nearby mall. When Bae heard that the store was closing and having a huge sale, he told the kids, “Grab whatever you want.”
When she got back home, though, she had an idea. She remembered thinking, “These are awful times. Why don’t I just buy everything in the store and give it away?” “I just went and did it.”
She and her husband spent about $10,000 to buy over 3,000 toys, coloring books, pencils, and other small items from the store. After taking her SUV on several trips, they were able to move everything to the spare room of their Norwood home.
But bringing the toys home turned out to be just the start.
“That was the start of the crazy,” says Bae. “My daughter told me, ‘Mommy, you can’t just give them out; you have to package them.'”
Adds Bae, “Then she said, ‘You should put ribbons on it because it doesn’t seem special.’ ”
She then wrapped more than 1,200 gifts and gave them to a homeless shelter, a food pantry in Norwood, and a nonprofit group that helps foster children in Bergen County called Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA).
Bae is a partner in a legal business with her husband, BJ Kim. “I got a letter from CASA saying that the kids were smiling and that we made a big difference, which made me feel great,” she says.
“But I said, ‘I can’t do this any longer, it’s too much work,'” she says, adding that she made the decision at the time, “We’ll give the remaining stuff to local kids who are having birthday parties.”
This year, though, local mothers calling her sparked Bae’s desire to help again. They wanted to know if she was going to wrap and give out any more gifts. “They said, ‘I want to help,'” Bae says.
In order to get ready for the holidays, eight mothers spent up to six hours wrapping gifts at Bae’s house every other day for weeks. Even Bae’s own children helped out in the end.
“I hope they grow up to be kind to people who don’t have as much as they do,” she says.
When they were done, about 1,400 gifts were ready to be sent out.
Last Saturday, Bae asked the kids in the neighborhood to come pick out five gifts each. She says, “They were silent.” “How often did you get more than a thousand gifts when you were a child? They really don’t know what to do and don’t know which option to pick.”
On Monday, workers at The New Jersey Institute of Disabilities in Edison got another 1,250 gifts for the kids they help.
Nicole Storino, who works as a development assistant for the organization and went to Bae’s house, says, “It was an amazing feeling of pure excitement that someone would go to so much trouble and be so selfless to make this happen.”
“To go into that show and see it was just an act of love,” she says. It was too strong.
Bae says that helping New Jersey kids “really makes me feel like I’ve made a small difference in someone’s life.”
Bae says, “This is the season of giving, and it makes me feel great.”
Bae and her husband have worked hard for many years to make a difference. Every year, the two of them hold a fundraiser for a Korean orphanage. In 2019, they raised $22,000 and gave it to the orphanage. Due to the ongoing pandemic, both the 2020 and 2021 events were canceled.
What will happen to the more than a thousand toys that are still in Bae’s spare room? “I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it next year,” she says with a laugh. “If I can do it, I’ll do it.”