Vashti Hunter appreciates the simple things in life.

Each day when she wakes up, the 72-year-old wiggles her fingers to make sure she made it through the night. Then, she thinks: It's good to be alive.

This Christmas, Hunter is grateful for one more thing.

The Northwest Roanoke resident is one of 1,225 seniors who will receive Christmas presents this week through the "Be a Santa for a Senior" project. The elderly service provider Home Instead Senior Care runs the program, which gives seniors up to four presents each.

It is a massive community effort to brighten the holiday for low-income seniors.

Volunteers buy gifts, wrap them and deliver them. More than a thousand volunteers are expected to hand out more than 3,000 presents this year, co-organizer Betsy Head said.

Many of the selected seniors will spend the holiday alone and, if not for the program, many would not receive any gifts, organizers say.

"This makes all the difference in seniors' lives who would not receive a gift otherwise," said local Home Instead branch manager Helen Burnett. "It literally brings tears to your eyes how grateful they are."

Like many of the seniors, Hunter's Christmas list was simple this year: stamps, food, toiletries.

The seniors usually ask for basic necessities including deodorant, Depends undergarments and CVS gift cards to help pay for prescription drugs. This year, organizers got two requests for chopped wood, presumably to warm their homes. Other popular items include simple comforts like warm bathrobes, blankets, sweat suits and candy.

Home Instead Senior Care started the project in Texas before it went nationwide four years ago. At that time, Betsy and Chris Head, co-owners of a franchise in Botetourt County, began the project in the Roanoke area.

Local social service agencies and the Local Office on Aging selected most of the seniors through an application process. Then, organizers typed up tags with the seniors' names and gift requests. They placed the tags on Christmas trees at locations such as the Olive Garden, the Red Cross, Jefferson College of Health Sciences and Wal-Mart.

People bought the presents and then dropped them off at Roanoke's Scottish Rite Temple, where up to 200 volunteers spent last week elaborately wrapping the packages.

Typically, about 10 percent of requested presents do not come in, and local businesses donate cash so that organizers can buy them, Betsy Head said.

The project has produced several marvels since it first started, Head said.

One year, a man asked for a new bathroom and furnace. When Head saw the request, she asked fellow volunteers not to enter it into the computer system, thinking it was too costly. But the request was accidentally put into the system and placed on a Christmas tree -- twice. The first time, Head saw the request on a tree at Wal-Mart and took it down. The second time, an employee at Home Shopping Network took it and decided to fulfill the request with some fellow employees.

Head wasn't sure about the details of how the HSN employees provided the bathroom and furnace or how much it cost. She estimated that it must have been a couple thousand dollars, adding, "That was a huge, huge miracle story that came out of it."

Both organizers and recipients value the effort that people put into the project.

"To see the love in the community to do something like this is just great," Dreama Locks said. The Roanoke social worker is delivering gifts this week to seniors, including some in the hospital.

On Tuesday, Locks delivered Christmas gifts to Turner, who looked at the large gift bag and said, "If there's a pea in there, I appreciate it."

Standing inside her living room, Turner reminisced about the days of bathing from a metal tub, pumping water and using an outhouse while growing up on a tobacco farm in Franklin County. Now, she is the mother of seven, grandmother of 16 and great-grandmother of five.

She lives alone and spends most of the time inside her home because a blood clot in her leg prevents her from walking much.

As Locks left, Turner wished her a merry Christmas. Then she added, "If I wake up and I'm alive, that's a good Christmas."