Local 10-year-old concludes holiday season with over $4,000 in donations to area hospital

     During the holiday season, most 10-year-olds are busy writing Christmas lists to Santa Claus or handling their anxiousness by snooping in their parents’ closets for gifts. For Cael Burmester, the holiday season has a bit of a different emotion, one of remembrance and charity.
     Over the last four years, while other 10-year-olds wait anxiously for Christmas for gifts and family, Burmester has taken to visiting area hospitals, bearing gifts for strangers, as a way to honor his late great aunt Jackie Simons-Lam.
     “My aunt, she had cancer,” Burmester said. “When I found out she wasn’t going to make it, I told my mom I wanted to start a program to give kids, who had cancer, toys at Christmas-time.”
     Simons-Lam had told Burmester before she died that there are many children at the hospital during the holiday season, who will spend that time in the hospital, away from family and friends. 
     Read the full article in the January 25 edition of the Hampton Chronicle.