Pandemic doesn't break first lady holiday hospital tradition
Melania Trump isn't letting the coronavirus pandemic break a decades long tradition of first ladies visiting a Washington children's hospital at the holidays. She planned her fourth and final holiday visit as first lady to Children's National on Tuesday, continuing a tradition begun more than 70 years ago by first lady Bess Truman. The hospital ‘tweaked’ the holiday program to safely accommodate the visit.
The first lady will still sit in a chair in front of a towering Christmas tree in the hospital's atrium. But she'll read to a small, socially distanced group of children rather than a big crowd of patients and their families, hospital staffers and singers and dancers. Her reading of the children’s Christmas story “Oliver the Ornament Meets Marley & Joan and Abbey” will be broadcast over the hospital’s closed-circuit television system so patients can tune in from their rooms.
“During each of my visits to Children’s National, I have felt the warmth that these brave children bring, seen the joy in their eyes and the smiles on their faces,” Mrs. Trump told The Associated Press in a statement. “It always reminds me that the spirit of Christmas is truly alive in each and every one of these courageous children.”
For more than seven decades, first ladies have “brought holiday cheer to children who are hospitalized and can’t be home during this special time of the year,” Kurt Newman, president and CEO of the hospital said.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/pandemic-break-lady-holiday-hospital-tradition-74734686
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