Isabelle, 12, and Katherine Adams, 9, pose for a portrait at their home in Dallas, on Nov. 4, 2015. (Photo by Danny Fulgencio)
Neiman Marcus is not a place you go when you want to stick to a budget, a point it punctuated last year when it sold frozen collard greens for $66. But Dallas’ flagship retailer’s famed “Fantasy Gift” list released unseasonable early every October is undeniably fun to peruse.
This year’s includes a private New Year’s Eve party for 300 in the heart of New York’s Time Square that will set you back $80,000. A trip to Champagne, France, to make your own case of bubbly is a cool $150,000. Then there’s the specially designed Rolls Royce at $445,750.
At $50, the one affordable item of the 2017 Fantasy Gifts is made by two students at Providence Christian School for Texas in Bluffview, sisters Isabelle and Katherine Adams, who are now 14 and 11, respectively. When they were just 8 and 5, the sisters learned that not everyone in the world has access to clean drinking water. They jumped into action, folding intricate origami Christmas ornaments that are sold to benefit their nonprofit, Paper For Water. Funds raised are used to build wells all over the world. We profiled the Adams sisters and their charitable work in 2015, when their nonprofit had raised more than $600,000 and built 90 wells all across the world.
If you’ve got extra cash to splurge, for $50,000 you can buy a clean-water well and an ornament from Neiman’s, but all proceeds from the $50 ornament sales also will benefit Paper For Water.
In 2011, Isabelle, 12, and Katherine Adams, 9, sold origami Christmas ornaments to fund a water well in Ethiopia. They then helped establish Paper For Water, which has raised over $600,000 and built over 90 wells in Africa and elsewhere. (Photo by Danny Fulgencio)
