Secret Santas give $100 bill to rural Bloomfield woman

BLOOMFIELD, Mo. -- A rural Bloomfield woman received an unexpected gift while on a routine grocery shopping trip Saturday.

Helen McCain was at the local Town and Country store when she was approached by a man and a woman wearing Santa hats.

"They were just a nice-looking couple, perhaps in their 40s, and when they approached me, my first thought was that they were handing out some sort of literature from their church," she said.

It wasn't literature. Rather, it was a $100 bill. The two said, "We're Secret Santas, and we'd just like to give you something."

The Bloomfield woman said she didn't know what to say at first.

"I told them, 'You've got to be kidding' and I asked them if they were from the North Pole," she said with a laugh, "and they said no, that they were from Bloomfield."

The couple told McCain they were just giving back something of what they had received.

McCain accepted the gift and finished her shopping, although she admitted she had trouble concentrating on what she needed to purchase.

Before leaving the store, she questioned the store manager about the couple. The manager didn't know the couple was distributing $100 bills.

"I would have been happy with just a 'Merry Christmas,'" McCain said Monday. "It just made my day."

What made her day even better, she said, is that when she returned home Saturday, her thoughts quickly turned to what she could do with the gift.

"I knew it was meant for me to give this away," she said. "I have a son in Spokane, Wash., who has been out of work for several months. I knew he would put it to good use. So I called him right away and told him it was in the mail."