By: Taylor Christensen | C&G Newspapers | Published December 1, 2025
METRO DETROIT — The holiday season is upon us, and families all over are preparing for the next few months of fun, food and gifts. But some families are wondering how they are going to pull it off for their children.
To help, local charities and nonprofit organizations come together each year to supply families in need with gifts and food for the holiday season.
For the 31st year, the Troy Police Department is hosting “Operation Blue Sleigh,” a program aimed at helping families in need in the Troy area have the best holiday ever.
Officer Greg Pokley, with the Troy Police Department, said that the team is helping 41 families this year.
Pokley said that 95% of the families selected are identified through the school system and can include kids who are on the free lunch program, or those that teachers know need help the most. The other 15% are chosen by road patrol officers who notice families in need.
“Operation Blue Sleigh encompasses our gift card drive, Shop with a Cop, and then adopt a family,” Pokley said. “This year I have 41 families and that number keeps going up every year.”
During the Shop with a Cop portion of the program, officers take the kids through Walmart and buy the kids a gift with a $100 gift card provided by Walmart.
“We have 41 families and 41 sponsors, generous, generous sponsors, throughout the city of Troy,” he said. “That can include businesses or just residents in Troy that want to donate to families in need.”
Sponsors of the program essentially adopt a family in need. The families send Pokley a wish list which he then sends over to the sponsors.
“I recommend (to the sponsors) sending roughly $100 per person that is in the family. I divide the families into small, medium, and large so that way the sponsors can pick what size they want, because it will give them an idea of what their budget will be,” he said.
Once all of the gifts are collected from the sponsors, the Troy Police Department hand delivers the gifts to the families at home on Dec. 22.
“We get a bunch of police cars, and we have some large vehicles that are blue, and we load up the vehicles and deliver them to each house that morning,” he said. “The officers get a kick out of that. They love doing that.”
During this time the Troy Police Department is also accepting donations, including money and gift cards. He said they recommend grocery store gift cards.
“We know that the kids, sometimes their best meal is when they are at school, and over the holidays, when they are on break, they don’t get that same food,” he said. “So we ask for grocery store gift cards, and we provide those families with gift cards as well as the sponsors providing the gifts.”
‘No Child Without a Christmas’
In St. Clair Shores, the Goodfellows have been providing holiday help for 99 long years, according to president of the St. Clair Shores Goodfellows organization, Mike Cook. The Goodfellows motto is “No Child Without a Christmas.”
Each year, the Goodfellows gather volunteers to sell newspapers on city street corners and collect food donations from the surrounding schools.
The newspaper sale is always on the first Saturday in December, which this year is Dec. 6. Volunteers fill the streets from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. selling newspapers for donations.
With the money collected from the newspaper sale, Goodfellows volunteers purchase food and gift cards.
Schools around St. Clair Shores also collect nonperishable items to donate, according to Cook. That food is then put into food baskets that are delivered by volunteers to needy families in the St. Clair Shores area.
“We collect nonperishable food through the holidays and then we have a help line that needy families can call and request help, and we interview those families and for every child under the age of 16 we give out a gift card so that parents can go buy Christmas presents for the kids,” he said. “Along with that on Christmas Eve morning, we take the food that was collected by all of the schools and deliver that to the needy families on Christmas Eve morning.”
Cook said that the food baskets even include turkeys to ensure the families have a full Christmas meal.
“We want them to have everything they need for a Christmas dinner so we go out and purchase turkeys so they have turkeys and stuffing and cranberries and all of the good stuff to go along with it, so they can have a nice Christmas dinner,” he said.
Cook said that prospective families that need Christmas help can call the Goodfellows hotline at (586) 980-0400. They start taking calls the day after Thanksgiving.
Being such a big part of these families’ lives is a heartwarming experience according to Cook, who has been with the Goodfellows for around 38 years now.
“Everybody deserves to have a nice Christmas. All children deserve to have a nice Christmas. It’s heartwarming when we can show up at someone’s house on Christmas Eve morning and bring them food and bring them the things they need, you know, maybe for some reason, they are less fortunate that year,” Cook said. “It doesn’t mean they are bad people, or they have had issues. Something has happened in their life that they need help. They may have lost their job, had an injury, they may have been hospitalized for something. So they have had an event in their life that they need assistance. And if we can help them just to brighten their day a little bit, it makes it all worthwhile.”
For more information about the Troy Police Department, go to troymi.gov. For more information about Goodfellows organizations in metro Detroit, go to detroit goodfellows.org.
For Christmas help from the St. Clair Shores Goodfellows, call (586) 980-0400. Donations can be made at any time at the St. Clair Shores Goodfellows, located at 26700 Harper in St. Clair Shores.