Just days before Christmas, single mother Dychaun Dunbar eagerly signed the receipt on the layaway full of Christmas presents for her 3 year-old daughter.
Dunbar was all smiles as she put a Dora the Explorer bike in her shopping cart, a "big girl bike" she feared would not find its place under the Christmas tree in time.
"Just the other day she was asking me, 'Mom, am I going to get anything for Christmas? Is Santa Clause going to come see me?," Dunbar said.
But Santa Claus has come, sans red suit and white beard. Two good Samaritans visited a Hialeah Kmart store to pick up the tab for families like Ms. Dunbar's.
In total, the Secret Santas paid for more than $400 worth of layaways. This act of goodwill has spread across the country, from Indiana to Nebraska and elsewhere.
In Hialeah, store manager Alba Strong, who has been with the company for three decades, says she's never seen anything like it.
"To get to call somebody to say, 'look, this happened to you,'" Strong said. "It's an awesome feeling to get to partake in it. 'It's paid in full come pick it up!'"
Kmart employees have dubbed these generous individuals "layaway angels." The store manager says the only criteria the layaway angels had was for the tab to include toys -- no questions asked about price.
When Strong picked up the phone to deliver the good news, she says some customers hung up, thinking it was a prank. Others were simply in disbelief.
One of those skeptical people on the other end was Dunbar.
"All the way here I thought, I hope it isn't a joke. I was just praying it wasn't a joke," she said.
Dunbar calls this gift a Christmas miracle because she didn't know how she would make the payment. She works in the cruise industry and during the off-season, her hours are slashed drastically.
Though the layaway angels wanted to remain anonymous, Dunbar has a message for them.
"Thank you, thank you, a million times over. You truly blessed me and my child this year," she said.
