Renaldo Wynn‘s “Holiday Wishes Come True” event was a big success today. Wynn, along with his wife LaTanya and a huge number of his teammates, escorted local children in need through Target, providing each kid with a hundred dollars to use toward whatever they wanted for the holiday season.

Byron Westbrook was one of the players who helped out with — and enjoyed — the event. “This was a great event today,” he said, “being able to help these kids who can’t get some of these gifts all the time get some of what they did want for Christmas. And it helps the parents out as well, gets something to make their kids happy. The kids had big smiles on their face the whole day.”

Westbrook and a few of his teammates, though, did run into some downtime before the event got started, and they amused themselves by tracing their hands on the disposable tablecloth in front of them and autographing the handprint.According to Westbrook, this was his idea. “Just in case the kids wanted to see how big an NFL player’s hand is,” he said, “I just [drew] my hand up there so they can put their hand in it. Just something for the kids.”

To hear Westbrook tell it, Kareem Moore and Lendy Holmes were just riding off his idea. “I put my hand up there first, and then Kareem wanted me to trace his hand,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Come on, man! You’re a grown man, you gotta do it by yourself!’ I made a little stick figure first, a little portrait, and he drew all over that too, so I’m like, ‘You gotta get your own creative mind, make your own designs.’”

You will no doubt be shocked to hear that Moore has a different recollection of the events.

“Man,” Moore said, “he was like, ‘I’m ’bout to draw my hand,’ and I said, ‘Let me do mine first.’ So we draw the hands, but did you see the extra work I put in mine? I put my tattoo on it. I actually put that in there, and then he wanted to put his fingernails in too.”

(The tattoo is of his son’s name, Kamren, and actually appears on his wrist pretty much like it does in the top drawing on this post.)

“You know, it’s like….” He paused, considering his simile. “It’s like water,” he said. “People come out with water, but then they come out with soda. Gatorade. They improve on it. So what?”

One thing Moore did not disagree with? The success of today’s shopping trip. “This was a good event, you know,” he said. “I had a chance to have fun with some of the kids. Just a good thing to give back to the community, period.”

The Redskins have signed the first five members of their 2009 practice squad:

• Safety Lendy Holmes, he of the distinctive haircut
• Fullback Eddie Williams, one of the team’s 2009 draft picks (and now the second of two guys named Ed Williams in the locker room, with offensive lineman Edwin Williams)
• Wide receiver Trent Shelton, which marks a great stride at repairing yesterday’s damage to the team’s Twitter presence
• Defensive end Rob Jackson, a 2008 draft pick who spent last season on the active roster
• Defensive end J.D. Skolnitsky, adding another local guy to the locker room

Notable for his absence on that list is quarterback Chase Daniel, who told me yesterday that he expected to be in this morning to sign his practice squad deal. Apparently, that didn’t happen.

This leaves three spots to fill to the full practice squad contingent of eight. I’ll have more posted as I hear it, although I think this might be it for today.Also, some quick clarifications for questions that have been coming up in the comments about the QB situation:

Colt Brennan has been placed on injured reserve. This means that he is still with the Redskins, but his 2009 season is over before it even started. The injuries he had accumulated over the preseason — a hip and a hamstring — were severe enough that the team elected to shut him down for the entire year to get him treatment.

UPDATE: As was noted in the comments, Antonio Dixon — who I spoke to at Target the other day, and who was waived by the Redskins yesterday — was claimed by the Eagles.

Here’s what safeties coach Steve Jackson had to say about undrafted rookie safety Lendy Holmes when I talked to him back in May:

“He’s very promising. Athletic guy. You wanna talk about ball skills, he’s got excellent ball skills, and he’s smart. It’s gonna be good to see what he can do once we get the pads on, because everybody looks good in shorts. It’s a talent show.

“But you wanna see the toughness and how a guy’s gonna react when it’s a hundred degrees outside and you’ve got guys who are bigger than you and faster than you that wanna knock you down, AND you’ve gotta remember your plays, AND you’ve gotta get out of there in one piece”

And here’s what a bunch of other people around Redskins Park had to say about undrafted rookie safety Lendy Holmes over the last month or so: “What’s up with his hair?”

Holmes has something of a unique haircut — or at least it was unique in my experience. Short on top but longish in back, it was something that might make some kind of sense in a music video (and did, in fact) but was a little unusual in real life.

“Oh, that?” Holmes’ college teammate Malcolm Kelly drawled when I asked him. “That’s a Dallas thing.”

“It’s called a ‘shag,’” Holmes told me, and he’s had the hairstyle for about two years, which — we both agreed — means that I’m completely out of touch. No real surprise there. I haven’t really changed my hairstyle since 1997, and even then I wasn’t going for anything quite so interesting.

Still, Holmes acknowledged that just about everybody on the team who didn’t know Dallas style had asked him about it, and said, “I just tell ‘em it’s a booty cut. People ask, and they don’t know about it till I tell ‘em.” Which made me feel a little bit better.

Holmes also agreed with Kelly’s assessment: “All the people wearin’ the hairstyle right now is everybody in Dallas.”

So I started asking around the unusually large contingent of Texas-based Redskins players.

“I’m familiar with it, but it’s more of a Dallas thing,” Brian Orakpo said. “I’m from Houston, we don’t do that.”

“I think it’s a Texas thing,” Derrick Dockery said. “Grow the big hair in the back, low cut on the top. If you’re from Texas you have all different kinds of haircuts, you know? I’d like to say we’re trendsetters as far as hairstyles. From Houston you got what you call a southside: a fade where you got hair on top, and no hair around the sides and the back. I don’t do nothin like that, but that’s what we do.”

Did you ever go for anything like that? “No,” Dockery said, “no. At my home my father and mother would not allow anything like that. Nice trim cut, you know, shave the face and that was it.”

“Yeah. The shag,” said Trent Shelton, “yeah, it’s real big. Everything’s big in Dallas. The shag, the Bobby Brown, flat-tops, all that. You see it all in Dallas. Everything is different in Dallas. The way they dress. Everything, just everything’s different. So when you go to Dallas, that’s normal.”

But, I asked, aren’t you from Dallas?

“I’m actually from Ft. Worth, so it’s like thirty minutes difference. We don’t do that stuff in Ft. Worth. It’s just Dallas boys.”

Kareem Moore was in the ice tub with Shaun Suisham when I asked him about it. “The first time I saw it, a rapper had it. Tum Tum.”

Suisham hadn’t noticed Holmes’s hair and asked Moore to describe it.

“They’ll cut the top down,” Moore explained, “leave the back. You feel me?”

Suisham digested this. “That’s the black man’s mullet,” he suggested. (Mild language warning in link.)

Moore thought about it and nodded. “Kinda, yeah,” he said. “You’re right. Ah, they’ve got all kinda styles now. They got this thing, they got the southside fade….”

“I was in Dallas,” Suisham said, “and I never saw it.”

I asked Suisham if he’d ever considered a similar look for himself, and Moore laughed.

“No,” Suisham said. “I didn’t. I didn’t. ‘Cause I used to go through all the books and stuff, when you go in and get your haircut, and I never saw that before. I mighta tried it.”

“Go and try it out now,” Moore suggested.

“Might make me look kinda fast,” Suisham said. Pretty much everyone in both tubs was laughing at this point.

“It does,” Moore said. “Aerodynamic at the top, back is the tailwind.”

This is Lendy Holmes. He’s a rookie out of Oklahoma, where he converted from wide receiver to cornerback and then to safety, and he’s one of the Redskins’ undrafted free agent signees.

And — if you can tolerate an hour of Deion Sanders saying things like “You gotta believe. You don’t believe in yourself, ain’t nobody else will. Believe that,” and “We gonna make you feel it today, baby,” — you can learn a little bit about what Holmes went through to prepare himself for the possibility of life in the NFL on Prime U, tonight at 8:00 Eastern time on the NFL Network.

According to NFL.com, Prime U “goes inside Sanders’ training camp in Irving, TX for a look at how the legendary cornerback imparts his knowledge of the game and life as a professional football player to the next generation.”

I don’t know much about Holmes — he played a bunch of different positions, had a decent but unspectacular workout at the NFL Combine, and was once leveled by a block from that kid who spent the draft hanging out with Bill Cosby — but, based solely on the enthusiasm on display in the picture above, I am completely unsurprised that he decided that learning how to prepare for the NFL Draft from Deion Sanders would be a good idea.

I missed the show when it initially aired back in February — tonight’s re-air is updated with material from the NFL Draft — but based on the clip below, it actually looks pretty good. (Note also an appearance by Redskins’ sixth-round draft choice Robert Henson out of TCU.)

I realize that the above makes me sound like I hate Deion, which isn’t precisely true. People who’ve met him swear he’s nice and smart and funny and all that, but I have never fully forgiven him for his mediocre-at-best year as a Redskin, memorable mostly for this bizarre choice of headwear on the cover of the team’s 2000 yearbook.

Prime U reairs several more times throughout the weekend and probably beyond. Check your local programming guide for details.