Listen: On Day 16 of Meet The Need, we met the Alliance School, a school serving grades 6-12 that acts as a safe haven for students who have had difficulties with bullying (learn more about them in the original post). We return to them today for a special Christmas story.

During my interview with Tina Owen and Jill Engle from Alliance, they told me about an Alliance tradition -- every year their staff handpicks a gift for each of their students. While the school is not huge (they have 175 seats), this is a wonderful and thoughtful gesture completely in line with the amount of care and attention Alliance gives their students. Through the course of discussing this gift-giving, Tina and Jill remembered one of their students, a young man who really really wanted some flannel pajamas and Christmas socks.

I took that chunk of the interview unedited and paired it with an instrumental of Christmas Time Is Here. Now, I present it to you -- I'm going to make my whole family quiet down for a moment to listen to this story before dinner and if the feeling moves you, your family might enjoy doing that too: