Rachael Ray helps local Christmas giving

NEBRASKA CITY – American television chef and talk show hostess Rachael Ray is credited for helping a Christmas giving account its 2021 start in Nebraska City.

Margaret Spiers of Nebraska City wrote a Christmas story as part of an online class. It recounted how she found $100 while walking on the 11^th Street viaduct and turned it into the police. After no one claimed it, she was thinking about what to do with the money when she read a Letter to Santa in the local newspaper.

The letter from a second grader asked Santa Claus to bring her mom flowers because she is sad.

Spiers had lost her own mother to cancer the year prior and wondered how a second grader would ever get the flowers to give to her mom. She recruited First Class Flowers and Gifts to deliver the flowers to her Northside classroom with instructions that Santa wanted them to go to the mom.

Rachael Ray wrote that she loved the story and sent $100 in hopes that the Christmas Club continue for “a merrier 2021.”

Spiers, founder of the Children’s Watering Tower garden, said she has been donating to the Christmas Club for three years now.

She said she has been motivated to help when she reads letters to Santa that say things like please bring a blanket or pillows, or even requests for food.