New York Immigrants Send Gifts Far Away, to Those Close at Heart Every year during the holiday season in the most immigrant-dense pocket of New York City, Karina Vacacela struggles to help one customer in particular package his Christmas gifts to send home to Ecuador. The customer always insists on showing off the toy trucks he is sending to the son he last saw as a toddler. "It's painful," she said, to have to remind him that his boy is now a teenager. Ms. Vacacela oversees shipping and exports at Delgado Travel, one of the many shipping shops lining Roosevelt Avenue, a scruffy corridor that runs through central Queens. Her patrons are mostly Latino men sending gifts to wives and children left behind in their countries of origin. The world comes to Roosevelt Avenue, more than 100 blocks long, where more than 120 languages are spoken. The avenue features an international array of delicacies, specialties, foods and fashions. But through the shipping stores, goods from New York go out to the world. This time of year the shops are more than depots of cardboard boxes and packing tape. They are portals through which relatives extend a helping handful of hard-won cash or a gift for a child left in the homeland. Here the ritual of gift-giving playing out across the country is tinged as much with love as it is with loss; in tidy shops all along the avenue, immigrant New Yorkers reach out to their roots. At Koko Cargo Express, a cramped shipping shop near Junction Boulevard and Roosevelt Avenue, Jessica Carangui, 10, took great joy in knowing that her favorite teal shorts would soon be on their way to Ecuador. She was packing hand-me-downs into parcels in the shop last week while she watched over her brothers, Marcelo, 8, and Leonel, 2, turnip-shaped in a snowsuit in his stroller. Holding the shorts up before her, she recalled the good times she had had wearing them, and then carefully folded them for her mother, Veronica Calle, 36, to pack into a parcel bound for South America. She was a big girl now, Jessica explained, and the shorts, sadly, were outgrown. They were headed to a cousin in Ecuador for whom they were perfect, both because the cousin was smaller, and because her family was crushingly poor. It was harder to give the sneakers, the suede gray sneakers that were a Christmas present for her brother, whom her mother had last seen when she left Ecuador for the United States when he was 6 months old. Today he is 20. "I want to bring some clothes to my brother so he could be happy and my mom can remember about my brother," Jessica said. To me, it's like something that makes my brother happy that he has the things like we have, everything equal to each other. Snow sifted down outside the shop windows. The ebullient little girl fell silent. She reached up and gently pressed her eyelids as if to push back the tears that were steadily falling. I feel a little bit sad leaving him by his own. Where Roosevelt Avenue crosses the Filipino pockets of Woodside, Queens, the Christmas presents have long been sent out - it takes more than 30 days by freighter, so conscientious givers send gifts by late October. But the shops are full of balikbayan boxes, boxes of homeward return. After Typhoon Haiyan swept in last month, decimating whole cities and killing thousands, relief aid and necessities, not trinkets, are being shipped from FRS Philippine Freight Services, said Angelita Arce, whose husband owns the shop. Still, she added, "I hope that presents aren't forgotten. Of course it's a pitiful sight, but you have to make the children smile. Diana Pallaroso was shipping a pint-size preppy outfit - chinos, sweater vest, crisp button down - and a superhero-printed tee shirt and soccer-ball pajamas to the 7-year-old son she sent to live in Ecuador two years ago. Caring for him while working two jobs became overwhelming, she said. Today she works with the single goal of bringing him back. "He's going to try and put them at the same time, the clothing on," she said, stroking the garments. Thinking about his laughter, she began to cry. It's quieter just down the street at Mahavir Pack and Ship, half a block off Roosevelt, in the heart of Little India. There, the big seasons are in the autumn, around Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, and Eid, the celebrative end to Ramadan for Muslims, said Rita Kandar, the owner. With the Chinese New Year only a month away, Wu Yuhuai, 24, and his mother and aunt were shopping and shipping at Hong Chang Business Center, where Roosevelt Avenue heads through Flushing's Chinatown. He scooped up packets of baby formula, labeling them to send home to his sister and her new baby in China's Fujian Province. It was not a glamorous gift but a necessary one, he said. Contamination scares back home have made American baby formula, as well as the fish oil pills he picked up for his grandfather, a hot gift item. The pragmatic gift, Mr. Wu said, meant more than a sweater. "They care about their health more than their beauty," he said of his family as he picked over which omega-3 oil pills to get. I care about their health, too. It is hard to demonstrate care for someone nearly 8,600 miles away, said David Belcher, a taxi driver from New Jersey who was on Roosevelt Avenue to send a package to his girlfriend in Manila - but he was trying. "She said she was cold," he said, pulling out four sets of fuzzy house socks. ""I said how cold is it, sweetheart?"; she said, "Darling, it is 83 degrees Fahrenheit." I said, "O.K., that ain't cold to me," but I am sending her these." The couple speak daily but in the past two years have seen each other only once, the gifts their sole physical connection. He hoped they would fit, he said, but even if she did not like the gifts, it did not matter much. Soon he will be sending something to the Philippines he knows she loves: He'll be there with her in the spring.