YOUR SPACE: No birthday gifts for this girl

OK, so you’re an 11-year-old kid growing up in the ‘burbs.

You don’t have to worry about your next meal. Only your next toy.

Yeah, well, try telling that to Jamie Garscadden.

She has refused birthday presents since she was 8. Instead, every year on her big day, she requests gifts for the needy.

It’s her high. “I just like the feeling I get when I help others,” she says.

She has never lamented all the Bratz toys she didn’t get to rip open.

Jamie was chosen as a Hometown Hero by the Pikes Peak Chapter of American Red Cross. Other heroes will be profiled weekly in this space.

The modest fifth-grader isn’t sure what to make of the hero fanfare. “It’s kind of weird,” she says, scrunching her freckled nose. “It’s exciting, too. I’m kind of proud of what I’ve done.”

I met Jamie at her Gleneagle home. We talked under the watchful eye of Paco, a fat cat with a loud purr and a massive shock of hair.

Jamie had on the new outfit she got especially for the hero awards banquet at the Antlers Hilton on April 2.

I know what you’re thinking: ‘New outfit, huh?’ The girl’s a clotheshorse. That’s why she gives away her toys.”

Hardly. Her idea of reckless plunder is a red satin Nehru blouse from a Tibetan shop, with black leggings and white ankle socks. 

She wasn’t worried about hair from lap-cat Paco sticking on her heroine clothes.

She has always been a kid who’d share the Cheerios off her highchair tray and give away her last clean diaper.

“She was more of a sharing-giving kid than a want-want kid from the day she was born,” says her dad, Dr. Alan Garscadden, a pediatrician who doubles as her cello teacher.

The toy angst epiphany for Jamie came when she was 8. 

“I had these big bins of toys and they were just filled to the brim,” she says. “I was like: ‘I don’t even need these. I never play with them.’ So we gave them to Goodwill.”

On her ninth birthday, she had friends bring items for the humane society. At 10, in lieu of gifts, she asked for food for Marian House soup kitchen. This last birthday was a Toys for Tots drive.

It isn’t limited to birthday benevolence. She volunteers for the Red Cross and Tri-Lakes Cares. She hit up her Antelope Trails classmates for donations for homeless veterans.

Jamie isn’t all Mother Teresa. She is Kaa the Snake in “The Jungle Book” school play.

“He’s a mischievous character,” she says.

That’s her alter ego. She’s as sweet as she looks, but you better watch your candy around her.

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