Sunday morning, hundreds of volunteers lined a red carpet outside the Omni Dallas Hotel to welcome on a special group of Christmas Eve guests.
The SoupMobile and Dallas Omni Hotel are hosting more than 500 homeless men, women and children for Christmas Eve.
The annual “Celebrate Jesus” event offers the red carpet treatment every Christmas Eve. Guests arrive in Charter buses, walk the red carpet and are shown to their rooms for the night.
The guests will stay in a room for one night, attend a banquet, church service and movie night.
“If you have it every day, you don’t think about it, you take it for granted,” said Lisa Kelso who says she’s been homeless in Dallas for a year. “Except for the churches and the people who come out and pass out food, we don’t get a lot of ‘I love you’ and ‘I miss you’.”
SoupMobile’s Arian Danian said the event reminds people who are struggling that others do care about them.
“On top of the food and the room, they feel really important,” said Danian. “Today we are giving them a lot of love and I think it’s important that everyone gets a chance to feel important for a day.”
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Organizers also hope to call attention to the plight of the homeless in North Texas.
The most recent census of the homeless population in Dallas and Collin Counties showed more than a 1,000 people were “unsheltered homeless”, meaning they were sleeping in the streets.
