Christmas Spirit: A Dog Story

In a news story very close to my heart, an author has taken his story about a town’s concentrated effort to foster rescue dogs for the holidays and turned it into a real-life mission.

Greg Kincaid wrote a best-selling novel called A Dog Named Christmas and just recently turned into a TV movie by the same name. The synopsis of the movie(produced by Hallmark) is that a young man convinces his entire town to rise up and take in all the abandoned dogs from the local shelter and home them for the whole of the Christmas season.

After the movie ends, Mr. Kincaid delivers a public service announcement like speech, entreating people to reach out to their local shelters through Petfinder.com and consider fostering an animal for the holidays.

"Hopefully there's going to be a lot of happy dogs sitting around people's fireplaces this Christmas," Greg anticipates.

The premise is that people would seek out and open their doors to needy animals for the week from Christmas to New Years Eve, states Greg, saying, "enhancing their own lives and the dog's life, rather than agreeing to adopt them right off the bat."

"When we first thought about this idea, I thought I'd be happy if we get 100 to 200 shelters. The first day we got 600 shelters," Kincaid reports.

Now more than 2,000 groups are taking part, thanks to Petfinder involving its network of shelters.  Mr. Kincaid wrote the book for his children 10 years ago as a bedside tale.  "I've always been concerned about pets in shelters during the holidays," he admits.  Kincaid and his family adopted a rescue dog titled Rudy whom is on screen with Greg when he delivers his important message on Sunday.

"I hope there's a wonderful nationwide response," says Brad Moore, president of Hallmark Hall of Fame Productions. "We hope this is something people want to take action on."

"So many of the pets are there (in shelters) because of a family's change in lifestyle, either a divorce or having to move," says Betsy Saul, president of Petfinder. "Not because they're undesirable."

Betsy says that animals need foster families more than anything else, stating, "The power of fostering is amazing. People are like, 'How can you give up a dog after you have cared for it and nurtured it?' But there's no better feeling ... than seeing a dog go off with a family you know is going to love it. That's a dream come true."

Adds Kincaid with genuine hope in his voice, "Maybe many people will decide to keep the dogs."

Talk about living the holiday spirit…