Across America, "Secret Santas" paying off families' layaway balances

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time of the year,” said Salima Yala, Kmart’s division vice president for layaway.

Items in layaway at a Michigan Kmart

Shannelle Armstrong, a spokeswoman for Sears Holdings Corp., which owns Kmart’s 1,300 stores said they know of $412,000 donated so far nationwide — each time by anonymous people who swear the clerks to secrecy and have a little fun picking out random accounts that appear to be past due and include children’s items.

Assistant store manager Darlene Beverly called some of the recipients. “Some scream, some holler — with joy, of course,” she said. “They cry big time.”

When it happened at her store, “it was just a give-you-goosebumps kind of feeling,” said store manager Katie Cook.

 Wal-Mart spokeswoman Dianna Gee says layaway angels are hitting its stores “from coast to coast.”

Generosity can be contagious, says Lisa Dietlin, a Chicago philanthropic adviser. After years of austerity, people are “knocking the economy in the eye and deciding not to be stingy this year,” she says.

Melissa Atwood, who lives in Michigan City, Ind., got a call Monday from a La Porte, Ind., Kmart notifying her that someone had paid the

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