KINGSVILLE, Texas — Around here, Santa swaps out his sleigh for a helicopter.
"We were just talking in the classroom about what events we can do to kind of help the kids throughout this year. It's been a tough year, this school year," Jubilee Kingsville Counselor Ellie Perez said.
Perez has seen how siblings Stephanie and Robbie Benavides are finding an entirely new way to bring Christmas joy to kids around South Texas, so they brought it to Kingsville.
"And so, some ideas came up and one of them was jumping on the bandwagon the other school districts do of having helicopter Santa arrive on campus,” Perez said. “So, everybody here, it was an idea that they came up with and I just initiated from there."
While the siblings have traveled far in the air, this is new territory for them.
"This is our first time here, so we wanted to bring Santa to the school and get the kids excited," Stephanie Perez, acting elf, said.
It started with a hired pilot, but after Robbie learned how to pilot himself in 2010, he's been doing it since. And from the air, they see the Christmas joy from a whole other perspective.
"They thank us all the time like, 'thank you, you don't know what you're doing for all of these kids,’" Stephanie said. “And it's kind of like I say you don't see the smiles that we see from the sky, the excitement we see from the sky. It's something we can't describe, it's an amazing feeling for us."
Jubilee Kingsville is the last stop on Santa's tour around South Texas. They've visited 13 schools and about 4,000 kids. And at each stop, every kid is filled with excitement.
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