At first, Krystal Melendez was a healthy baby. That lasted until she was about 6 weeks old.

"One morning - it was a Sunday - she started shaking," recalls her father, Juan Carlos Melendez.

Melendez hustled her to the doctor. Krystal's ailment turned out to be cerebral palsy.

When she was 4 years old, in 2007, Melendez brought Krystal and the rest of their family - his wife, Alba, and their other daughters, Kiara and Karla - from Puerto Rico to Charlotte, where he has a cousin.

"The medical help is better here," Melendez explains.

The family needs it. Since they moved here, Karla, now 12, has developed epilepsy. Kiara, 10 has asthma. "There's a lot of medicine on the shelf," Juan Carlos says.

Krystal, 9, can't eat, bathe or otherwise take care of herself without help. So her mother has to devote herself to caring for her.

That means only Juan Carlos can work. In Puerto Rico, he was a lighting technician in theaters and televisions studios, he says. He did that for a decade until the family moved to North Carolina. In Charlotte, he worked first in construction, then became a material handler for a textile company. He helped make cotton balls and other products.

Last March, the company shut down that part of its operation, Melendez says. He and the workers around him were laid off.

Melendez has been unemployed since then. His only work comes when a contractor needs him temporarily to help out installing sheet rock or doing other tasks.

"It's not full-time," Melendez says. "When they need me, they call me."

Christmas doesn't wait for dad to get a new job. So Juan Carlos turned to the Salvation Army's Angel Tree program in hopes of brightening the holidays for his daughters.

Angel Tree, part of the Salvation Army's Christmas Bureau, helps find clothing and gifts for children who are age 14 or younger. It puts each child's clothing sizes and wish list on one of dozens of Christmas trees in businesses, shopping malls and other locations around Charlotte. Money from the Observer's Empty Stocking Fund helps in cases where children signed up for the Angel Tree are not adopted. On average, about $60,000 is spent annually by the Salvation Army to buy toys for unadopted children, officials said.

The Melendez girls' requests went onto a tree in uptown's Founders Hall. Krystal's list includes a Laugh and Learn puppy. Kiara hopes for a skateboard and Lego blocks. Krystal dreams of a skateboard, too, and electronic Scrabble.

The girls deserve a nice Christmas. Karla, a sixth-grader at Socrates Academy - a language-oriented charter school in Matthews - has nearly perfect grades in Chinese and Greek, Juan Carlos says.

Kiara, a fourth-grader, hopes to land a place at Socrates, too.

Krystal is a third-grader at the Metro School uptown. Even though she was almost helpless when she arrived, Juan Carlos says, she now does therapy on the floor. She works hard trying to sit herself up.

"The Metro School," her father says, "is doing a good job."