Laid-off woman's Facebook plea brings help for Christmas

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — When Elizabeth Garcia looked at the bare area under her Christmas tree and considered the bills that had been mounting since her last job layoff, she knew she had to do something to give her family a merry holiday. She turned to social media.

Garcia, 33, one of thousands of North Dakotans to lose their jobs during oil's current downturn, went public with her plight on Facebook. She offered to sell a camper she had bought earlier this year for $500 so that she could give a real Christmas to her son, 8, and daughter, 5.

Although she got no offers for the camper, the replies brought her to tears. A store offered to let her pick out presents for her kids. People donated toys, store gift cards and grocery store cards.

"If you saw my Christmas tree right now, it is absolutely ridiculous how many presents are under there," she said. "If I wouldn't have put the [Facebook] post up, I probably wouldn't have been able to get my kids any presents at all."

Garcia, a single divorced mother who moved to Watford City in the western North Dakota oil patch from Colorado in 2012 to start a new life, was laid off last summer from her job with a company building a natural gas plant. She later was laid off from welding and carpentry jobs.