Despite growing up poor, I always had Christmas gifts from Santa. As an adult, I discovered the truth.

• My family lived on food stamps and in a trailer, but Santa always brought plenty of presents.
• Years later, I learned about angel trees for kids in need and realized where our gifts came from.

I believed in Santa Claus until I was almost 11. While I could barely remember the last time we could afford to have a tree to decorate, there had always been presents, even when we lived in a roadside motel and Mom pointed at a blinking light in the sky and said, "Look, kids, Santa!" (That year, I got a fuzzy target and Velcro-crossed ping-pong balls to throw at the bull's-eye.)

We lived on food stamps and "commodities" (free government surplus cheese, dried beans, peanut butter, and dried milk). So an oversize magical elf was just as rational an explanation as any for the gifts piled beside our trailer's wood stove every Christmas morning.

But one morning, there was nothing. Mom got up with a gasp and ran through the trailer like she had forgotten something and retrieved a stack of wrapped packages from somewhere outside — maybe the naked underbelly of the trailer, maybe the cab of our beat-up, broken-down Dodge pickup.

Gratitude staved off any temptation to feel heartbroken or lied to. The provenance of the presents was still just as mysterious as Santa. The blinking light in the sky that night at the motel had been a plane, as I'd suspected. And there were bigger issues to worry about, such as whether the roof would leak, or the pipes would freeze, or the sheets of polyester Mom stapled to the windows would keep out the draft through the winter.

While Christmas shopping as an adult, I discovered the truth

It wasn't until I was out of college, a parent myself establishing Christmas traditions for my own little family and doing my middle-class shopping for toys my kids would forget by New Year's Eve, that I figured it all out. I caught sight of a ginormous cardboard box full of wrapped presents next to a fake fir decorated with hundreds of construction-paper ornaments.

"Care to participate in our angel tree?" a fresh-faced, Santa-hatted kid with a clipboard asked me. After her brief explanation, I took a closer look at the paper angels on the tree. Each had a handwritten first name and gender, an age, clothing and shoe sizes, and a short wish list: board games, Barbies, remote-control cars, Tamagotchis, Lego Friends.

My epiphany was long overdue, slow but intense: Pink KangaROOS sneakers, my first brand-new pair of shoes; straight-legged Lee jeans; shrink-wrapped Monopoly; a sliding tin of chocolate-mint lip balm.

Santa wasn't a magical elf. He was a benevolent stranger.

In my life, I must have passed hundreds of trees like this one and never made the connection.

My childhood angel-tree memories inspired me to help others

Swallowing tears, I scooped up a dozen angels. Cutting my toddlers' gift budget in half, I filled my cart with clothes and toys for all the little versions of a younger me. When I went back on the day before Christmas Eve to add my wrapped packages to the pile, five or so angels remained. I Santa-ed those kids, too.

As the years passed, we participated as a family, unable to pass an angel tree without adopting a stack of names. My kids helped choose the clothes and toys we'd give to the children who otherwise might have meager holidays or no Christmas at all. One year, we Santa-ed a dozen older folks in a nursing home — many of their family members lived out of state or overseas.

We live in France now. There are young refugees from all over the world living here who will watch their classmates celebrate the winter holidays while their parents may lack the means to give them the same. My angel-tree story has motivated some local French friends to take the initiative to replicate the experience here.