CALIF. COUPLE CRAFT WITH A PURPOSE
Husband, wife make holiday toys for kids in need every day
Mike Sullivan took up woodworking after he and his wife, Judy, retired, and he was enjoying carving butcher blocks, wizards and dragons in his workshop — but he wanted to create something with more purpose.
Sullivan said he’d been thinking about the single present he’d received in 1954 when he was growing up in the small mining town of Noxon, Mont.
His father earned $1 a day as an underground hard rock miner and couldn’t afford to buy Christmas gifts for him and his four brothers that year, he said.
“Instead, for my present, my dad took a tin maple syrup container that looked like a log cabin and attached an empty spool of thread to make a water wheel,” recalled Sullivan, 73. “He cut slits in the spool and put in playing cards so the wheel would turn in the creek.”
“It was the best present ever,” he said. “It became my favorite Christmas.”
Sullivan, a former construction worker, looked around at the wood scraps in his wood shop in Desert Hot Springs one day in 2013 and realized what he wanted to do.
“I talked about it with Judy, and we decided we’d start making wooden toys to give away to kids the following Christmas,” he said. “That first year, we made 360; cars, trucks, cradles, puzzles, pull toys, rocking horses — you name it.”
Eight years later, the Sullivans now crank out about 1,500 handmade toys each year to donate to local children’s charities, school districts and homeless shelters throughout the Coachella Valley.
Mike Sullivan handles the sawing and construction, while Judy, 72, attaches wheels, paints the toys and tests each one for safety — often with help from her 15 grandchildren.
“If it breaks when they’re playing with it, we know we need to start over,” she said.
Local businesses donate much of the scrap wood, said the Sullivans, but they still dip into their own savings every year to keep their Santa’s workshop humming.
“We’ve been blessed — there’s not much that we need,” said Mike Sullivan. “My sales policy is not to collect a single penny. Everything we make is given away.”
“No parent should have to choose between buying a Christmas toy for their child or feeding the family,” added Judy Sullivan. “That’s what keeps us motivated.”
“There’s no place I’d rather be than working side by side with Mike in the shop,” she said, noting that they just celebrated their 51st wedding anniversary.
Last year, the couple’s daughter, Sheleilee Sullivan, 43, started a GoFundMe to help offset the costs of materials and allow her father to buy a laser engraving machine.
“My parents have huge hearts — they want to give every child a happy Christmas and don’t want anyone to go without,” she said.
They’re at work on the toys seven days a week, sometimes for 10 hours a day.
“If anyone in the family needs to find them, they know to look first in the wood shop,” she said.
This month, everything from miniature construction cranes to jewelry boxes were packed up and distributed to local charities to be handed out to children in need over the holidays, said Mike Sullivan. The couple is now getting a head start on next year’s toy workload.