Teacher Shares Students’ Christmas Wishes on TikTok and Gifts Start Pouring In

Las Vegas isn’t usually the first place to come to mind when one thinks of holiday cheer (bright lights notwithstanding, of course). The city usually invokes thoughts of either fun and games or wild, seedy, behavior, but there’s more to the city beyond the Vegas Strip – including a very special high school that serves a lot of students from hard places. One teacher from Desert Pines High School, recently went viral when she posted about her students on TikTok, and the responses from total strangers have brought some holiday miracles and joy to Sin City.

In her TikTok video, teacher Cheri Guy shared about the school’s “Wishmas” program, where the faculty and staff strive to grant Christmas wishes for some of their 3,000 students. The program is simple: kids write down something they would like to open on Christmas morning, and are encouraged to share why it’s important to them.

But it’s why it’s important to run the Wishmas program in the first place that has tugged at the TikTok community’s hearts. “We have a lot of kids who are in the foster system, we have a lot of kids who are living in poverty,” Guy told TODAY.com. “These kids are facing enormous stress outside of the classroom.” The wishes are mostly quite simple, and  in some cases, quite heartbreaking.

In Guy’s TikTok video, she openly cries as she reads some of the requests, which range from a bag of Taki chips “so I won’t feel hungry,” to “help paying for my cap and gown for graduation,” to “I would like a Wingstop gift card. It will give me free food for the day.”

@attagirlguy Even if you can’t help, maybe you can share #teacher #wishlist #students #holiday #highschool ♬ original sound – JustSomeGuy

Guy’s tears turned into a plea for help to get all these wishes met for the kids she teaches each day.

“Maybe spread this around,” she said. “Maybe we could do something to try to make some of these things happen. Because there’s no way — even if all the teachers, if we all picked one student, we couldn’t cover everything. There’s so many students and they don’t want a lot.”

As the internet sometimes does, it responded to Guy’s tearful pleas in a big way, and gifts started pouring into the school from complete strangers. This of course, moved Cheri Guy to tears once more. She told TODAY that 950 kids are participating in this year’s Wishmas, and that because of the kindness of strangers, “We have well over 300 wishes granted, which is amazing.”

She says that for these kids who have dealt with loss, trauma, and poverty in their childhoods, seeing strangers reach out with love and tangible gifts is invaluable.

“One of the most incredible things about Wishmas is these kids are realizing that they are loved — and not just by the staff at school, but by strangers around the country (who) care about them and believe in them,” she says.

She says all this kindness goes well with a sign that hangs in her classroom. It says: “One Person Can Change a World.”

“It used to say, ‘One person can change the world,’ but I changed it to ‘a world,’ because it’s not about changing the whole world. That’s what overwhelms us,” she says. “But if you can just think about, ‘What can I do for one person?’ That’s changing a world — and if we could all do that? Just imagine what our society would turn into.”

The kindess of strangers is changing a whole lot of of worlds for some Las Vegas teens this Christmas, and I can only imagine the ripples that kindness will create for years to come. Hats off to Guy, her fellow teachers and staff, and all the strangers who are making Christmas wishes come true for some deserving teens this year!