Santa's 'grandchildren' spread joy in Italian nursing homes

ALZANO LOMBARDO, Italy (AP) — Emotions are running high this holiday season at the Martino Zanchi Foundation nursing home in northern Italy near Bergamo after months of near-total isolation for its residents.

Long-time resident Celestina Comotti was disbelieving as a staff member read aloud a Christmas greeting from a family peering at her expectantly over a video call.

“Damn!’’ Comotti exclaimed when nursing home staff confirmed that her well-wishers - 9-year-old Simon, his sister Marta and mother Alessia - were people she had never met before. The 81-year-old woman dissolved into tears.

"I am trembling,” she said, adjusting her eyeglasses.

Despite a grim year marked by death and loneliness, the holiday spirit is descending on the Zanchi nursing home, one of the first in Italy to shut its doors to visitors after a COVID-19 case was confirmed in the nearby hospital on Feb. 23.

The bearers of glad tidings were the so-called “grandchildren of Santa Claus,” people who answered a charity’s call to spread cheer to elderly nursing home residents, many of whom live far from their families or don’t have any family members left.

The “Santa’s grandchildren” program is in its third year. Last year, it matched 2,550 “grandchildren” with residents of 91 nursing homes. This year, 5,800 gifts were dispatched to 228 nursing homes around the country -- an outpouring that is, in part, a reaction to the devastating toll that the coronavirus has had on the elderly, comprising the majority of Italy’s confirmed 70,000 COVID-19 dead.

This was the Zanchi nursing home's first year participating in the “Santa’s grandchildren” program. The town of Alzano Lombardo, where the home is located, was one of the hardest hit in Bergamo province, where Italy’s...