Shopping for Christmas at Second Chance

LaNell Waldrop likes to decorate the inside of her house … with trees. All told, LaNell has close to 100 trees lining halls and filling rooms in her Cat Spring home when she goes all out for Christmas.

LaNell likes to create entire scenes around her trees. (One tree has a Star Wars theme, for example.) So she is always on the lookout for a new, maybe unusual, plant or critter to add to her collection. Unusual is what Second Chance Emporium does best. The non-profit store in La Grange always has clothes and furniture and kitchen wares for people, but it also has a good share of things you just won’t find elsewhere.

LaNell spotted a buckskinshirted, bearded gnome with a Texas flag on the Second Chance Facebook page and had to have it. “I love him,” she said. “He’s like a rustic Santa.” Perfect for an indoor forest. “I had to have him,” she thought.

Second Chance is open Fridays and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. All profits from the store go back to local nonprofits such as fire departments, food banks, scholarships and health care. Last year, Second Chance returned over half a million dollars to local organizations.

Second Chance makes monthly grants to Tejas Healthcare, the AMEN food pantry in La Grange, Schulenburg and Flatonia food pantries, Combined Community Action, Bluebonnet Trails Community Services and the Fayette County Prescription Drug Program. Last month, the store also made two special donations:

• $10,000 to Fayette County Habitat for Humanity, to help outfit a new tool trailer to be used by Habitat volunteers on building projects throughout the county.

• $10,700 to help Senior Connections in Schulenburg to help the organization with grant writing, to purchase a Ryobi blower, to build a hydroponic indoor garden and to fund satellite expansion sites.

LaNell Waldrop wasn’t the only one scanning Facebook for Second Chance oddities. The week LaNell found her pioneer Santa, there were nearly 200 people waiting in line for the store to open. The person second in line had driven in from Houston, arriving in La Grange at 3 a.m. LaNell Waldrop didn’t go to such extremes. But she got her Davey Crockett lookalike anyway.