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Her last year there, she decided to do something for both the parents who knew and appreciated exotic food, and the child, who responded to smells and little tastes on his tongue. She found a recipe for spicy popcorn in a vegetarian cooking magazine that included banana chips, ginger, cayenne, and garlic.

“I thought, ‘This is right up their alley,’” says Sheridan, who now works in a skilled nursing facility at the Saratoga Retirement Center in California’s Silicon Valley. “It was delicious.”

The parents enjoyed the popcorn, she says, and placed a banana chip on their son’s tongue. Later, after the parents went to bed, Sheridan cleaned out the medicine cabinet, throwing away expired or discontinued medicines, a New Year’s tradition she still observes whenever she can.

Family traditions

At the oncology unit of Providence Portland Medical Center in Portland, Ore., patients often return for treatment several times, says Lindi Goins, RN, OCN, assistant head nurse of the unit. Patients and staff get to know each other so well that celebrating the holidays together seems natural, she says. “We’re pretty involved. We’re just kind of a part of the family.”

On Halloween, the nurses decorate the unit on their own time and dress in costume. Birthdays and anniversaries for patients and family members call for special cakes from the kitchen, balloons, and songs. The staff once held a wedding reception for a patient who got married in the hospital chapel and nurses arranged the patient’s medication schedule so they wouldn’t disturb the couple on their wedding night.

During the winter holidays, nurses and other staff members help families decorate patient rooms. When one patient’s daughter came to spend the night with her at Christmas, nurses hung candy canes from the branches of a unit tree and put it in the patient’s room “to make it seem a little bit more like Christmas for them,” Goins says.

The unit is often as busy during the holidays as any other time of the year, she says, but nurses still make time for the celebrations. “It’s important,” she says. “It’s important for the patient, it’s important for the staff. It’s something that makes us feel good.”

Sometimes the holiday spirit can infect an entire hospital, as it has for Children’s Hospital of Austin. About five years ago, Beth Hadi, RN, then a nursing student, offered the services of her father, Larry Gier, who played Santa for homeless shelters and Elk’s Club parties in his native St. Louis. She told her hospital’s Child Life Services Department, “I’m sure you already have a Santa, but if you don’t …”

They didn’t, and were thrilled with Hadi’s offer. They suggested her father could pass around candy canes. But her father pointed out that a real Santa gave gifts. The hospital’s Child Life Services staff searched their supplies and provided Hadi with leftover puzzles, coloring books, and other items they used to cheer up young patients. For the first few years, Hadi, her father, some family members, and sometimes hospital volunteers went from unit to unit until they ran out of gifts.

When Hadi was hired as a nurse on the pediatric intensive care unit, she mentioned the project to the nurses there. They and other staff members immediately offered to help, forming committees and holding bake sales to raise funds to buy toys. Last year, the program became officially sanctioned by the hospital. The PICU staff raised $5,000, mostly by selling baked goods and T-shirts, and from staff donations. This year, they are involving the community even more. Various businesses and the local hockey team are donating proceeds to the project.

Last year, Hadi says, her father was accompanied on his rounds by a cadre of volunteers, many of them spouses of the PICU nurses. They piled wrapped toys onto a gurney and went from room to room, handing out gifts to children and their siblings, making sure they had something for every child in the hospital. For many children of lower-income families struggling to pay medical bills, the present from Santa may have been the only one they received that Christmas, Hadi says.

This year, staff members started their fund-raising in September, and again plan to have a toy for every child in the hospital. They want to put names on the gifts and, when possible, buy toys their young patients specifically ask for. Many staff members have told Hadi that they have never spent a Christmas as meaningful as the ones in the hospital, watching or helping Santa hand out toys.

“We have so many stories,” Hadi says. “Seeing the little kids, pushing their IV poles, reaching up for Santa … It really does bring home what Christmas is all about.”

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