Charitable Christmas
How could it be conceivable that I’m back to a place where Christmas articles are possible? This year has flown, surely like no other, and while Christmas is still a good couple of months away, preparations for the blessed event are getting underway. Facebook is buzzing with the start of Christmas shopping, the shops are at about Month Three of the Christmas buildup and questions are being asked of where we’re heading, who we’re bringing and how much seafood there will be exactly. So the ugly question of what to buy your loved ones starts to rear it’s ugly head,
Waive
Christmas is a fantastic time of year. I particularly love Australian Christmases- they’re hot, you eat prawns and drink a beer on the back porch. Bliss. Yet I find the money that gets spent on gifts a bit troubling. Of course, finding the perfect gift is a great feeling but I tend to reserve that for birthdays and not for Christmas. So maybe you could make an agreement among your nuclear family that gifts were being waived this year. Just hanging out, spending some time together and having a great meal should do the trick.
Gifts Of Paper
I love the Oxfam Christmas gifts. Every year, they put together a series of presents you can donate, and ‘give’ as a gift to a loved one. For instance, last year you could donate, on behalf of a loved one, a sheep to a village in a third world country to provide sustenance and industry. And to be honest, after decades of looking up from a garish necklace and trying to rearrange my features into joy, I would be stoked to be ‘given’ a goat. There are lots of possibilities like this- just google Christmas donations and a whole stack should come up.
The Family Fund
Another cool way to get charitable this Christmas is to agree upon a charity that everyone will donate to over Christmas. Of course, it doesn’t have to be compulsory and no one has to declare how much they donated. But the general idea is that, whatever amount you usually spend on a Christmas gift, you can now donate to a charity. Keeping it undeclared helps people to donate what they want to spend, and can afford to spend. It’s especially helpful in mitigating the awkwardness for of uneven gift-giving, and stops competitive gift-giving in it’s tracks. There are a couple of ways to set it up- decide on one charity that everyone will support for an unspecified period of time. Or choose a couple and rotate among them. It can be difficult settling on one charity, that every one feels passionately about. Another way of avoiding that scenario is to choose one person from each family, and those people settle upon a charity. After all, the money is desperately needed in a lot of places so it’s hard to make a bad choice.
Time
A friend of mine spends every Christmas morning with her dad at the soup kitchens. To be honest, until hearing that, I had never even considered that as an option. And, of course, it doesn’t have to be all day, you can just invest a couple of hours helping out at a volunteer Christmas lunch. It’s a pretty hard time of the year to spend alone, so it’s an amazing gift to give.
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