Jennifer Lopez plays Santa to raise money for charity
Jennifer Lopez says she doesn’t look forward to getting gifts at Christmas — she looks forward to giving them.
“I love going and shopping for Christmas presents for everybody and making gifts for people and seeing their faces light up and surprising them; that’s where I get my joy,” the entertainer said last week.
It’s also why Lopez launched her J. Lo’s Christmas Gift drive, asking fans to donate to her three favourite charities (the Boys and Girls Clubs, the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles and the American Red Cross). In exchange, she’ll give someone two tickets to the last show of her Dance Again world tour in Puerto Rico on Saturday; she’ll also pay airfare and hotel costs.
“It’s just that kind of doing something nice for somebody, and they do something nice back and kind of paying it forward,” she said in a phone interview Friday from Australia, where she was performing.
She’s promoting the contest on Twitter with the hashtag JLOSCHRISTMASGIFT. She got the idea to use social media to encourage her fans to give back since becoming more involved in platforms like Twitter and Facebook and seeing how much response she’s received when she’s had contests. She said: “I thought, ‘What if every person I tweeted and asked for a follow donated a dollar?’ I have 13 1/2 million followers (on Twitter).”