Photo by Jamie Plain
Christmas magic rarely begins on Christmas morning It starts months earlier in storage buildings, restaurant dining rooms, church offices and city parks. It takes shape as volunteers sort toys, employees assemble bicycles and crews lift decorations into place. It grows through phone calls to businesses willing to donate a meal, a gift, a truck or simply a few hours of work.
Across Owensboro, familiar holiday traditions depend on people who return to the work year after year. Some coordinate programs serving thousands of children. Others create meaningful experiences for a handful of families. Some collect gifts and food, while others make the city itself feel like Christmas.
Their efforts are different, but they share a common purpose: making sure someone else experiences joy, belonging and hope during the holidays.
The five people featured on the following pages represent only a portion of the work happening throughout Owensboro each holiday season. Barb Birgy leads an effort built around granting Christmas wishes. Kim Roberson turns her diner into a center for bikes, meals and giving. Victor and Carla Haworth connect paper angels and red kettles with families in need. Travis Owsley creates celebrations for children, seniors and families experiencing homelessness. Johnathan “Cookie” Cook has spent decades placing decorations that become part of Owensboro families’ memories.
Together, their stories reveal what Christmas magic is made of: time, generosity and people willing to do the work before anyone is watching.
The five profiles in this section represent only part of the work that brings Christmas to life in Owensboro. Randy Lanham shares the season through concerts and outreach performances, while Dr. Connie Ford leads the community’s annual production of Handel’s Messiah. Carter Hoagland, Chase Roberts, and other local lighting enthusiasts spend weeks transforming their homes into destinations for families. Across the community, countless musicians, decorators, donors, business owners and volunteers add their own piece to Owensboro’s Christmas magic.
Fifty Years of Wishes
For Barb Birgy, directing Christmas Wish means discovering how much a community can accomplish when every person contributes one piece.
When Barb Birgy tells stories about Christmas Wish, the memories rarely center on the number of toys in the warehouse.
She remembers grandchildren who asked for a washing machine so their grandmother would no longer have to carry the family’s laundry to a laundromat. Birgy called Green River Appliance and Furniture. The company supplied the machine, and another volunteer delivered and installed it.
She remembers a man grieving the loss of his dog. After his wife wrote to the program, Christmas Wish worked with SPARKY to surprise him with another companion.
“You feel like it’s a small part, because it’s just Christmas,” Birgy said. “But then when you really look at a lot of moments that transpired during the season, you realize it’s more than just gifts.”
Christmas Wish enters its 50th season this year. Birgy has led it since 2015, when longtime director Sally Davenport was ready to step away. Birgy had recently left a corporate career to work part-time at the radio station, and the timing brought her into a role she never expected.
That first year, Christmas Wish served 586 families. Last year it helped more than 1,800.
Birgy sees that growth as thousands of individual acts. Towne Square North donates the seasonal headquarters. A business supplies storage. Restaurants feed volunteers. Companies provide drinks, snacks, equipment, and delivery help. Between 25 and 40 volunteers may work on an ordinary December day.
“The community is the biggest part of it,” Birgy said. “We couldn’t do it without them.”
Her own milestone accompanies the anniversary: Birgy has now spent 30 years at the radio station. She is researching Christmas Wish’s earliest years and speaking with people who helped transform a few gift baskets into one of Kentucky’s largest Christmas assistance programs.
Still, she resists presenting the story as her achievement.
“I never wanted it to be about me,” she said. “It’s truly about the people in the community who have made this happen.”
She did not plan for Christmas Wish to become such a defining part of her life. Looking back, she considers the opportunity a gift of its own.
“If my days on Earth are over,” she said, “I can look back and say what a blessing it has been.”
A Bigger Table
What began with pizza and bottled water has grown into a network of meals, gifts, and experiences designed to remind people that they belong.
On September 11, 2020, Travis Owsley went to Kendall-Perkins Park with pizza and water.
The gesture was small and largely self-funded. The need he saw was neither. With guidance from a community advocate and support from people who began noticing the work, Owsley turned that first distribution into Beverly’s Hearty Slice.
The nonprofit’s name still reflects food, but its work has expanded far beyond a meal. It now supports scholarships, voter registration, older residents, and families facing homelessness. At Christmas, those efforts become a series of experiences built around dignity and belonging.
The organization’s largest holiday celebration brings together meals, toys, bicycles, gift cards, and even major household items. Local businesses and high school athletic teams contribute to a setting where children and adults are both remembered.
Christmas at Colony focuses on older residents, arranging gifts and transportation while honoring the legacy of Wayne Foster. Hope for the Homeless gives families connected with local shelters two nights in a downtown hotel, along with Christmas Eve food, presents, Santa photographs, and a Christmas Day meal.
The lodging is an essential part of the gift. Instead of receiving a package and returning immediately to the pressures of unstable housing, families are given time and space to experience the holiday together.
That approach reflects the growth of Owsley’s original idea. A meal may be the beginning of a relationship rather than the end of one. Visibility attracts partners. Partners make larger efforts possible. Each event introduces the nonprofit to another person who may later volunteer, donate, or connect a family with help.
Owsley’s new work with Welcome House creates another bridge. He expects to connect housing resources with the meals, events, and relationships Beverly’s Hearty Slice already provides.
The organization’s Christmas schedule now spans several days and several populations, but its purpose remains close to that first afternoon in the park: meet people where they are, offer what is available, and make the circle of support wider.
More Than a Place to Eat
Kim Roberson measures the success of her diner by what it can give back.
By late fall, the work at Kim’s Diner extends well beyond the grill. Bicycles arrive assembled and in boxes. A storage unit begins filling up, and the overflow reaches the garage at Roberson’s daughter’s home. Then Roberson and her employees begin putting bikes together for children and teenagers they may never meet.
Last year, the diner’s Christmas Wish drive produced 152 bicycles.
The effort reflects how Roberson thinks about her business. She wants the bills paid at home and at the diner, and she wants her employees to have a place to work. Beyond that, accumulating wealth has never been the point.
“I don’t care to get rich off the diner,” she said. “As long as I can pay the bills at my house and pay the bills here to keep it running, that’s all I care about.”
Roberson’s understanding of need began early. Her mother left when she was 8, and her father raised three daughters alone. Roberson assumed much of the responsibility for her younger sisters while he worked, including helping care for a sister with significant disabilities.
Her father dreamed of owning a diner. Roberson fulfilled that dream after his death, opening Kim’s Diner three months later.
“I feel like a little girl who came from nothing, and I was able to grow up and achieve my dad’s dream that he couldn’t,” she said.
That history gives the diner’s holiday work its meaning. The bicycle drive is highly visible, but it is only one part. On Thanksgiving morning, the restaurant serves a free breakfast for people who cannot afford a meal or have no one with whom to share the holiday. A Toys for Tots box arrives as Christmas approaches. The diner also helps provide meals through local organizations.
The bikes offer the clearest image of that philosophy. Donors save money by buying them unassembled, and Roberson and her staff supply the labor. Boxes, bolts, and handlebars become rows of finished bicycles ready for Christmas morning.
It is work Roberson accepts willingly because she recognizes the difference one gift can make.
“If I can give just a little bit back to my community,” she said, “that makes my day.”
The Man Behind the Lights
For nearly four decades, Johnathan “Cookie” Cook has helped turn Owensboro’s parks and public spaces into part of the city’s Christmas tradition.
Long before families arrive at Legion Park, someone has to decide where the lighted scenes belong. Johnathan “Cookie” Cook wants visitors to wonder what waits around the next bend, rather than find the same figure on the same patch of grass.
“You don’t want the same scene every year in the same spot,” he said. “I like to switch it up.”
Cook has worked for the City of Owensboro since 1988, shortly after graduating from Owensboro High School. He spent the previous summer at the city shop in Chautauqua Park and took a full-time position when one opened.
Holiday in the Park was itself only a few years old. Cook has helped decorate Legion Park nearly every season since.
The displays looked different then. City workers and community participants cut and painted decorations themselves, while schools created oversized Christmas cards. The 2000 tornado damaged or destroyed much of the collection, accelerating the move toward newer illuminated structures.
Cook saw those changes as an equipment operator. He retired in 2018, returned to full-time work around 2020, and eventually became a crew leader — a promotion he initially resisted because, as he reminded coworkers, he was supposed to be retired.
His holiday responsibilities extend beyond Legion Park. Cook and his crew assist at Smothers Park, assemble trees at the Owensboro Convention Center and another city park, and install banners and wreaths along Second Street.
He approaches those assignments with the same care he gives Legion Park.
“I took pride in that,” Cook said. “I want to make sure it looks good. I don’t want to have a crew go out there and just start throwing up stuff.”
The work matters because he sees the displays become part of family histories. His adult daughters still return to Legion Park. Other visitors remember seeing the decorations as children and now bring children of their own.
“I love it,” he said. “I just like seeing people come out with their family and seeing the kids happy. When they get older, maybe they bring their kids.”
After more than 36 years with the city, Cook has watched downtown and Smothers Park change around him. He will turn 58 in November and has no end date in mind for the Christmas work.
As long as he is physically able, he plans to keep helping create the scenes that other families carry into their memories.
“We try to make everybody happy,” he said.
Called to Serve
For Victor and Carla Haworth, Christmas assistance is one season within a life built around the Salvation Army’s mission.
By the time an Angel Tree gift reaches a family’s vehicle, it has passed through a network most recipients never see. A numbered tag reaches a store or workplace. A donor shops for a child. Volunteers transform a gymnasium into a warehouse, sorting every package so siblings remain together.
Capts. Victor and Carla Haworth oversee that process at the Salvation Army of Owensboro, where the Angel Tree program expects to serve approximately 670 children this season.
Their partnership began long before Owensboro. Both became involved with the Salvation Army church as teenagers and met at its Bible college in Atlanta. Carla graduated a year before Victor, who completed the program in 1989. They married in 1990 and built their lives around Salvation Army ministry.
They were assigned to Owensboro in June 2023. During their first three years, they helped convert a former thrift store — closed before their arrival — into the Hope Center, where most of the organization’s social services now operate.
The building houses a food pantry serving an average of 250 households each week. Last year, it distributed approximately $550,000 in groceries. When funding is available, the Salvation Army also helps with rent and utilities.
Christmas brings those year-round relationships into sharper public view. The Haworths oversee Thanksgiving food boxes for assisted-living residents, Angel Tree gifts for children across four counties, and the familiar Red Kettles outside local stores.
The kettles finance more than a few weeks of holiday activity. Their proceeds support groceries, housing assistance, child care for working parents and summer camp long after the decorations come down.
In each of the Haworths’ first three Owensboro seasons, the community has returned gifts for every child placed on the trees.
Victor sees that record as an expression of trust between the organization and the region it serves.
“The community support has always been fantastic for the work of the Salvation Army here,” he said. “We are very thankful for it.”
For the Haworths, making Christmas possible is inseparable from the work occurring at the Hope Center every week. The gifts matter, but so do groceries in February, utility assistance in summer, and safe child care when school is out. The red kettles and paper angels are the seasonal face of a calling they carry all year. OL
