"At first I thought they were going to be like, 'oh my gosh she's got these kids that she can't take care of,' and I thought people were going to look down on me for that and they don't," Tracy tells us.
For the second year in a row, Tracy and her husband wouldn't have a Christmas for their three young children without the Salvation Army. "We have a lot of medical bills and my husband has a lot of credit card debt, and it just slowly started catching up and snowed us all at once, and we were suddenly drowning. We're just trying the best we can." Trying to keep the house out of foreclosure, trying to put food on the table, and trying to have a holiday.
"Are there are trains? He loves train stuff. Oh there's Chuggington," she says excitedly, picking up a toy.
Tracy is one in one thousand.
"We did about 900 appointments last year so it's about a 10% increase," says Major Norman Grainger of the turn-out at the toy shop. And 15 to 20% of those thousand shoppers are new to needing holiday help.
"People don't want to come to the Salvation Army for toys, people don't want to come to the Salvation Army for food," he continues.
Maybe not, but Tracy has to, and she's got no reason to hang her head about it; she's in good company.
"It's not something I want for my kids," she says, tears in her eyes. "I don't want them to have to grow up like this, knowing that this is the only way we can have a Christmas or have food on the table. But I like that the programs are here and available to us so that we can have a Christmas and can have food on our table."
Tracy told her 3-year-old Ian, that Santa doesn't have time to deliver all the gifts so some parents have to pick them up, and that's what she was doing Wednesday afternoon. She says the train set she picked out for him will be his first of that kind and one Tracy never thought they could afford.
Like every parent who shopped, Tracy also took home food, a meat voucher, and what's called the "mother's basket"- a bag full of extra toys, games, and a little something for mom too.
