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Whether you celebrate Christmas, are part of the fight against cancer, or just like to help out others in need:

Seven years ago, my friends and I started caroling for fun. When people started giving us money, we decided to put it to use and donated it to charity. Through the years, the donations grew, along with the impact we were able to make in our community.

Caroling for Kristen continues this tradition. As we have all graduated from college, Michael, Max, Azure, Ali, and I are no longer able to carol together. However, we have started an online donation page for anyone who wants to contribute, so we can donate to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in honor of our dear friend, Kristen Graham. 

Click here for a few words from Kristen’s family, the link to donate, and some Christmas carols!

We are collecting funds through the 21st of December. Our goal is to get $2,000, which is just a few hundred dollars above the total we were able to raise the last time our group was able to carol a few years ago. So please donate if you can and share this with everyone you know! It will mean a lot to us, the Grahams, and especially Kristen!

Please let me know if you have any questions. Good luck with finals, everyone, and have a happy holiday season!

merry-christmaas:

Hi everyone, my friend Rumil asked me to post a link to this to help raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma society.

It was a christmas tradition of theirs to go caroling for donations every year, but in 2010 their friend Kristen passed away, and they started caroling for donations towards the Leukemia & Lymphoma society which they then donate in her name. 

It would mean a lot if you could pass this link around and maybe donate a bit of money towards it, even if it’s just a couple of dollars it would help them! Thanks <3

TL;DR - Please take time to do something for a good cause this holiday season (even if it’s not Caroling for Kristen). Even the smallest gift could make a huge difference.

Hey everyone!

I know I said I would be away from tumblr but I feel like this is important enough for me to get back on for a while.

In high school and undergrad, Michael, Max, Azure, Ali and I went caroling every Christmas. The first year was just for fun—choir nerds, right? Then people started donating money, and not knowing what else to do with it, it went to charity.

We just really loved to sing. For the four nights before Christmas Eve, we would drive around town looking for lively-looking neighborhoods. We’d knock on the door in a semicircle (probably creeped some people out!) and told them we wanted to carol for them! We sang some really old-school stuff that were composed a few hundred years ago, hymns people knew, and even a few of our own arrangements. We went from door to door despite snow and ice, and sometimes people invited us in for cocoa and cookies. It really made me smile when people to whom we had caroled in previous years would recognize us, and expected us to come back year after year.

Over the years, we were able to donate money to Salvation Army, Angel Tree, Toys for Tots, the local battered women’s shelter, and eventually (unfortunately) to the Leukemia society. How much money we donated really surprised some people. We raised a couple thousand bucks just by singing for four nights? We were on the news and people wanted us to sing at their Christmas parties.

And every year, the donations increased. It went from a few dollars to a hundred to nearly two thousand! Sometimes children would dig up as many quarters as they could, sometimes the richer folk asked “What’s the biggest donation so far?” and would match or top it. And even despite some tough times recently, the locals never stopped donating. It was so touching to know that they really cared enough that it didn’t keep them from opening their hearts and wallets to those in need!

The sad part is that we can’t do it anymore. All five of us now live in different states across the country and it’s been really difficult to coordinate getting together now that we’re grown up. But we really wanted to still contribute somehow. So we all decided that we would donate our own money, but it still wasn’t much.

I have been saving up my tips for the last month (our store doesn’t get much tips because it’s a pick-up sandwich shop) and have only managed to raise $121. I hope to reach $200 by Christmas, but that’s still not enough!

So that’s why we started Caroling for Kristen. It’s a GoFundMe page Ali created to help raise money online so we can all donate to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society in honor of Kristen. And I’d like to ask for your help. Please. And it doesn’t even matter who you’re donating to, or what you’re donating. I just ask that you spread Christmas cheer to someone who needs it by giving your time, or money, or some other efforts (Hint: Spread the word!). If you have any questions, feel free to message me. I can also help with ideas on what you can do for your community if you can’t afford to take out any money.

I’ll leave you with some words of wisdom that Kristen blogged on her Xanga back in the 9th or 10th grade: 

“I encourage you to try to make a difference in the lives of everyone you meet…”

Okay, gotta go. I hope you take the time to read all that and that it spurs you into some sort of action. Before I forget, here’s a few pictures: