They’re a site on winter New York Streets as common as those black snow mounds that seem to last until August: Salvation Army Santas. The money raised by those tireless red-suited bell ringers helps assist four-and-a-half million people each year during the Thanksgiving and Christmas Holidays. And they’ve been ringing those bells for a long time.
It was in 1891, faced with the daunting task of feeding the 1000 people he’d promised meals to, that Salvation Army Captain Joseph McFee came up with the idea of putting out a large kettle with the words “Keep The Pot Boiling” on it in order to raise funds. He said that he got the idea from something known as a Simpson’s Pot that he had first seen in Liverpool, England which also collected money to help the needy.
When the idea of the collection kettles was combined with that of dressing up unemployed men in Santa Suits to man them, a true fundraising success story was born. Just a decade later, in 1901, enough money was collected in New York City to host a gigantic sit-down dinner for the poor at Madison Square Garden.
If you haven’t yet had a chance to drop a coin or two into one of the red kettles, you can still make Santa happy by donating online through the Salvation Army’s Online Red Kettle Program–or even starting a kettle of your own!