Town Comes Together to Give Boy With Cancer One More Christmas

A small Canadian town is providing a real-life Christmas miracle to a 7-year-old boy with a brain tumor, bumping up the holiday by two months to make sure he can experience one last Christmas, WPTZ reports. According to ABC News, Evan Leversage has been fighting cancer for five years and was told last month he may not make it to Christmas. That's when relative Shelly Wellwood sprung into action. “I made up a flyer just seeing if we could get some local support to put lights up and bring him Christmas," she tells ABC. The idea took off. Nearly 5,000 people are expected to arrive in St. George—a town with a population of only 3,000—for Evan's Christmas celebration Saturday. "The county is expecting the biggest thing St. George has ever seen," Evan's mother Nicole Wellwood tells KGO-TV.

In preparation for Christmas in October, ABC reports St. George businesses put up holiday decorations, and Main Street was done up for the season. There'll be a parade with floats. And volunteers strung up lights at Evan's house and left gifts for him and his two brothers under the tree. But the holiday cheer has expanded even beyond the town. According to WPTZ a movie production company will be blanketing the town in snow, and strangers are pitching in on a GoFundMe page. "When people meet challenges in life, everyone has a different way of reacting to them," Nicole Wellwood tells KGO-TV. "Evan's way of responding was to continually smile." (More uplifting news stories.)