- December 24, 2025
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It was a group effort of giving as volunteers filled roles like binding Christmas trees, hoisting them onto vehicles, and even helping kids choose presents.
However, the people involved were also united by the memory of someone who helped make the gift possible.
As president of Thanks for Giving Trees, Jody Osceola leads the effort throughout the year to provide Christmas trees to families in Sarasota and Manatee counties every December, in honor of her brother Joshua Morris.
“It’s a mission of love for me, and it’s a way for me to honor my late brother,” Osceola said.
During this year’s distribution at Bayside Community Church’s Bee Ridge Road campus, the nonprofit reached the milestone of giving away its 1,000th tree.
Joshua Morris was born the day after Christmas, when Jody Osceola was 2.
She says that was the best Christmas present she could ever receive, and that losing him unexpectedly five years ago was devastating.
Like others do, she describes him as a person with an extraordinarily giving heart.
Morris, who lived in Sarasota, gave away 203 trees during his lifetime, before he died two weeks prior to the first distribution he helped set up at the church in 2020.
While he was alive, there had been discussions of the organization he established becoming a nonprofit, a status it later attained as Osceola worked to keep its mission going.
She has tried to grow awareness of the organization, also known as also known as Thanks For Giving, the Joshua Morris Foundation, through activities like visiting school guidance counselors to inform them about the process to nominate families, and attending school board meetings.
“We're almost to that dream concept that he was talking about, and it's amazing to see it go from that to this, and be able to have the kids honor their dad, honor the good parts that he did, whether it was bringing food to the hospital during Covid, or giving the family that robbed him bicycles and groceries and not pressing charges, offering them parenting classes,” she said.
The variety of trees the nonprofit obtains allows the families who are selected to choose from among them.
She says the families are the most needy in the community, including many families at Wilkinson Elementary, where she is a parent.
In addition to the trees themselves, families receive lights, decorations and presents and can enjoy craft stations, food, a hay ride and greetings with Santa Claus.
Joshua Morris’s acts of giving started with a gift of its own.
One Christmas when he and his wife, Hannah Morris, did not have a tree, they were given one anonymously by a friend.
Joshua Morris decided to pay the act forward, setting aside a small part of his paycheck so he could give three other families trees the next year, and five the year after that.
“He and I worked on everything,” Osceola said. “We were partners pretty much since he was born.”
Joshua Morris also ended up partnering with Alex Krumm of NextHome Excellence, whom he met through his real estate work and who was also a high school friend of Osceola, as well as with Bayside Community Church.
Krumm describes Morris as “a phenomenal human, like one of the best that you’d ever meet.”
“He wouldn't tell people that he was doing things. Things would just happen, and it was just him behind the scenes doing something, and that's pretty rare,” he said. “You don't see that. He wanted no glory. He didn't want it.”
The nonprofit is run through relationships Morris established, including one with Tampa Bay distributor Great Lakes Christmas Tree Farms, which sources trees from around North America.
Osceola also noted that many of the people volunteering on Dec. 6 were friends and family members.
Hannah Reid, a friend of Morris since the second grade, said it carries on the legacy of someone who was the "biggest giver."
"I love that his kids get to have this every year to think of their dad and remember, so being here just always makes me feel connected to Joshy still, and it just means the world that his heart still gets to be seen and remembered… He was, and I always want his memory to be, the amazing friend, father and just human that he was to everybody, his heart of gold.”
Recipients like Christina Vazquez said they were glad to be able to enjoy the experience of a real Christmas tree.
"I've never had a real tree before, and the offer was something that my kids were excited about," she said. "They were looking forward to having something real, something that they can take care of, and it feels good to find some place that wants to spread that joy."
Osceola says for the family, life will never be the same, but the event is an opportunity to come together, be positive, and give back to the community, a way to to keep Morris' memory alive as well as to grieve.
Morris' memory is felt there by participants like his son Levi Morris, 11.
“It just gives me joy to see these people have a tree for their Christmas, and have a present, for the people that can't afford or are having a rough time," he said. "Whenever we do this, it just brings me so many emotions, because my dad, he did this, and he brought joy to these people."
