Today’s Wauwatosa seventh-graders are too young to recall the time, more than a decade ago, when the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train’s Tosa Village stops were not yet a cherished highlight of the city’s annual holiday celebrations. But Michela Miller and Madison Sveum will never forget.
Miller and Sveum were students at Longfellow Middle School in December 2014 when they saw the colorfully illuminated Holiday Train pass through the village without stopping. Canadian Pacific, now known officially as CPKC, schedules its stops across the country but only in communities where local partners have demonstrated they are serving the needs of families struggling to put food on the table.
That got Miller and Sveum thinking: Are there hungry families in Wauwatosa, and could Canadian Pacific be convinced to help?
In 2015, the seventh-graders got to work, and they soon found that the answer to both questions was yes. The result that December was the very first Tosa stop on the Holiday Train’s journey, an unexpectedly successful celebration that drew more that 10,000 people to pack the village’s streets — and pack food bins with donations for the Tosa Cares food pantry — while the train’s holiday light show and musical performers entertained the crowd.
“It was very eye-opening to consider the level of need that might be in our community,” Miller, now 23 and a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, told Tosa Forward News in a phone interview this month.
This year’s Holiday Train is scheduled to arrive at its Tosa Village stop around 4 p.m. Dec. 10. Tosa Cares is celebrating 10 years of a partnership that is still going strong since Miller and Sveum got the ball rolling, partly as a Girl Scouts project to earn their Silver Awards.
Sveum, 22, told Tosa Forward News that that back in 2015 they contacted as many local leaders as they could think of — the mayor, the police and fire departments, the Tosa Village Business Improvement District and other community organizations, as well as Tosa Cares — to rally behind the idea, because they weren’t sure if Canadian Pacific would listen to a couple of seventh-graders. They needn’t have worried.
“It was an overwhelming ‘yes’ from them,” Sveum said. Canadian Pacific “had never seen so many letters in support” of a new Holiday Train stop.
Sveum, who is finishing up a bachelor’s degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, won’t be able to make it to this year’s Holiday Train. Miller, too, will be away at school. But both have been thrilled that support for the Holiday Train and Tosa Cares remain strong after a decade.
“I like the fact that there’s this continued support from our community,” Miller said. “It clearly demonstrates dedication to one another that I find very powerful in Tosa.”
Tosa Cares is a volunteer nonprofit organization dedicated to providing food to families in need within the city. Linda Ertel, Tosa Cares’ coordinator, said the organization’s decade-long partnership with Canadian Pacific has raised more than 76,000 pounds of food and $13,000 in financial donations.
The goal for this year’s Holiday Train is to raise 10,000 pounds of food and at least $3,000, Ertel said, though turnout can vary with families’ schedules and the weather. (Online donations can be made at tosacares.org/donate.)
“Everything aligned wonderfully for that first event. It was such a celebration of the beginning of this journey and the beginning of this partnership between Tosa Cares and Canadian Pacific,” Ertel said.
The legacy of Sveum’s and Miller’s initial determination lives on each year when the train makes its stop on the tracks at the heart of Tosa Village. Volunteers with shopping carts circulate among the crowd to collect food donations. “The community is out there supporting, and there’s always this feeling of goodness in the community around this event,” Ertel said.
That is particularly important this time of year, she added. The food and money raised through the Holiday Train helps Tosa Cares sustain its food distribution at least through the winter months, after other holiday food drives conclude. She also emphasized that the Girl Scouts continue to be a major partner in the event, which also is promoted by the Village BID.
“Thank you to Michela and Madison for bringing the Holiday Train to Tosa! It wouldn’t be Holidays In the Village without it,” the BID said in a social media post about the origins of the Holiday Train’s Tosa stops.
Wauwatosa police have advised the public that streets through the village will be closed starting at 2:30 p.m. Dec. 10, particularly State Street and Harwood Avenue. The lower Harwood parking lot also will close starting at 2 p.m. Everyone is invited but should keep off the tracks at all times.
Miller and Sveum hope to make it back to Tosa to see the Holiday Train in future years. Until then, they are proud of what they started but even more grateful that it has continued.
“Just seeing the community connection and knowing how much food was being raised was such an empowering feeling,” Miller said.
- David Paulsen, a Tosa East Towne resident and editor of Tosa Forward News, has more than 25 years of experience as a professional journalist. He can be reached at editor@tosanews.com.
