4-year-old twins sent letters to Santa by balloons—a stranger 650 miles away found them and made their wishes come true
Many kids hope to get special things from Santa Claus. But the person who fulfills their wish might not necessarily wear red clothes or come through the chimney. Similarly, twin girls had released balloons with letters attached to Santa, in hopes that they would get what they wanted. But instead of reaching Santa Claus, the balloons and letters reached a stranger who lived around 650 miles away from the girls and the person decided to fulfill their every wish, per CBS News.
The family had a tough year in 2020, like many other people. Despite that, a Kansas mom, Leticia Gonzalez, wanted to do something special for her 4-year-old twins, Luna and Gianella, when Christmas came. So she encouraged them to write letters to Santa and send them through balloons. She thought it would be different than just writing a mail. So her daughters wrote their Christmas wishlists and attached them to the balloons along with their names. However, Gonzalez hadn't thought that anyone would actually find the balloons, let alone answer the letters attached to them. After sending out the letters, the family went to Mexico for their vacation and ended up coming back home to a big surprise from Louisiana.
The girls had released the balloons on December 1 and a man found one of those around a month later. He spotted a red balloon tangled in a fallen tree. "I dreamed all my life of finding a balloon with just a name and number and calling and saying, 'I found your balloon,'" the man, Alvin Bamburg, who found the balloon near his home, recounted. He picked up the balloon and checked the letter. "I saw a note attached to it. And on this note, it was sealed with a single red star and I thought, 'What is this?' So, I broke it open and it was Luna's Christmas list." When the Gonzalez family came back from their vacation, they saw a post on Facebook about someone finding their balloon in Louisiana.
The man had decided to do something about the list and posted it on Facebook along with his wife. It was shared widely and reached the family pretty soon. Bamburg found out that the balloon had been sent out by the twins. Many of his friends reached out to him and offered to help him fulfill the Christmas wishlist. "All my friends started saying, 'I'd like to donate this,' or 'I'd like to donate that.' And we got all the gifts we could — the puppy was the hardest to find," Bamburg explained. He wanted to get every single gift that had been mentioned on the list and decided to get a puppy for the girl as well.
Bamburg found a dog in April 2021 and drove towards Kansas with his wife. The family met them halfway through in Oklahoma and exchanged gifts with them. "I just felt like they were family now. When they took the puppy, they just showered us with food and gifts. And we're going back up there in about a month or two. We're going to give them some Louisiana treats." Gonzalez remarked, "So many wonderful people still exist on this Earth. Even if it's a stranger who takes time out of their day to make somebody happy."