about the project

Every year from 11/11 to 12/12 you help to fulfil the Christmas wishes of children and young people from children’s homes throughout the Czech Republic. In the past 11 years we have already fulfilled 16 990 Christmas children’s wishes worth CZK 21 450 000, thanks to you!

Project Wishing Tree allows people to buy Christmas present for a child or a young person who do not have the chance to spend Christmas with their family. You can fulfil a wish easily and quickly from your computer or mobile phone. The project is organised by a non-profit organisation LET’S GIVE CHILDREN A CHANCE, which provides comprehensive help to specific children and young adults from children’s homes in the Czech Republic. All children from cooperating children’s homes can participate in this beautiful Christmas project.

The Christmas wishes are uncovered to the public on November 11 each year. The opportunity to buy a gift ends on December 12, at midnight, or when the last wish from the list is fulfilled.

Each wish has its own icon in the form of the gift photo. For each wish the name and the age of the child is listed as well as their “Letter to Santa” and price. Children’s wishes can be filtered according to several criteria. You can choose whether you want to make a boy or a girl happy, how old should the child be and how much money are you willing to donate. You can also view all the wishes and choose the wish that you like the most.

If you cannot decide what wish to fulfil, you can help by sending a contribution to the project’s account 6072121028/5500 under a variable symbol 9999. We use these contributions to pay for the unfulfilled wishes and thanks to them, we have also managed to fulfil all the children’s Christmas wishes in recent years! You can also contribute via card payment through secure terminal HERE or by QR code.

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We also pay for the unfulfilled wishes for the money from double payments, which occasionally occur when one wish is paid for simultaneously by two donors.

We send a corresponding number of “Letters to Santa” to all of the cooperating children’s homes in order to obtain all the necessary information about both, the child and the present. Older children can choose a specific gift themselves directly on cooperating e-shops. Aunts and uncles (what they call the educators in the children’s homes) help the younger children with the selection of their Christmas wish.

In this volume, it is impossible to order individual gifts through different e-shops. We need reliable and helpful partners with a suitable assortment in order to manage this beautiful, but administratively very challenging, Christmas project to such an extent every year.

Many thanks to Petra Kubíková (SeSrdcem.cz), for her long-term, intensive cooperation, without whom the Wishing Tree project could not work. Petra took over a whole part of the project from administration of the wishes, their storage, sorting and packaging, to the distribution of the gifts to the children’s homes. All the gifts are sent or handed over to representatives of individual children’s homes during the last week before Christmas holidays.

Dear Santas, we really appreciate your donations, but we have a favour to ask. When choosing a gift, please think about those who have the opportunity to buy only one cheaper wish. If you buy one that is more expensive instead of a few cheaper ones, you will make the child very happy (as no one else might pay for an expensive gift) and you will also allow other people to participate in the project as well.

Thank you for helping us to make children happy!

Team LET’S GIVE CHILDREN A CHANCE

History of the project

We started preparing the Wishing Tree project at the end of the year 2011 but it was not launched until the following year, on Christmas 2012. All employees of the organisation always took part in the project and we also had to hire temporary workers to help us with the administration of the wishes. Until 2016, we transported all the gifts from Kroměříž, where they were stored, to Prague where we wrapped them with the help of our volunteers. When all the presents were wrapped, the representatives from all of the cooperating children’s homes then had to pick them up. In the first years of the project we even distributed the presents to cooperating children’s homes ourselves, but due to the large amount of presents, that soon became impossible. Since 2017 most of the administration, including gift wrapping, has moved to Kroměříž. This move allowed us to expand the project and fulfil more wishes. Now people can get involved and buy the gift in person while in the Arkády Pankrác shopping centre.