Charities.
Most mean well. All donors mean well. It’s unfortunate that like retail stores eager for “Black Friday” – when their operations move from loss to profit in the year – charities are also dependent on the holiday season to boost their collections. Also more than enough people offer to volunteer to serve a Thanksgiving meal to the hungry. As if they aren’t hungry the other 364 days in a year. Consider year round giving to whatever charities you support.
My focus here is on those Christmas centered charitable programs.
One with the very best intentions that gets it wrong is Toys for Tots. Not wrong in the collection of massive amounts of toys but in delivering those toys. The children show up before Christmas and are handed a gift that they unwrap on the spot. For the poorest of children, that leaves them with nothing to open on Christmas. For the not quite as poor, it’s just an additional toy.
Ethically, also find it problematical that Toys for Tots is a United States Marine Corps Reserve program. Is it such a good idea to have the poor children at a young age associate getting a toy with the military? However, the major alternatives aren’t unproblematic – there’s the Jaycees and there’s The Salvation Army. Capitalism or Christianity. Oh well, it is Christmas after all.
Whatever the Jaycees do, it appears to be extremely localized. Some limited to accepting “letters to Santa” and writing a response. Some go a step further and collect and delivers toys.
For well-branded and organized Christmas giving that is also localized, the Salvation Army does an excellent job. (It’s Back To School Assistance programs are also excellent. If you want to see happy children, be a “Shopping Buddy.”) If you have some spare cash and can’t be bothered with much of the Christmas frenzy, nothing too much wrong with dropping some cash in one of those red buckets if one can consider good deeds as on a higher plane than very bad words.
A program that does toys for children better than Toys for Tots is the Salvation Army’s Angel Tree.. The toy selected is, or close to, what the child has asked for, and it’s delivered to be opened on Christmas morning. The child doesn’t have to publicly appear and be identified as poor. The Army works with other social service agencies to identify those in real need.
For the more ambitious, there’s the Adopt a Family program.
There’s one slight deficit in these programs – not for the beneficiary but some donors. Before getting to that allow me to describe an adopt-a-family for Christmas effort with the very best intentions that got it wrong.
A women living in an upscale retirement community (what I half-jokingly refer to the more bucks than brains geezers) spearheaded this a few years ago. She solicited one gift for each member of the destitute family from her neighbors. That’s not one gift for each of those in the sponsored family, but one gift for each from each donor. She also let it be known that she was donating two gifts for each family member, not so subtly raising the ante for her neighbors. The neighbors didn’t balk. They ended up with half a truckload of gifts for one family.
The donor neighbors were never entirely clear how this family came to the attention of the organizer. (It wasn’t through the Salvation Army.) Nor exactly how destitute they were. They were living in temporary housing at the time. It was an overwhelming amount of stuff for one family. Stuff that would have to be carted to their next house. One woman that participated in the gift delivery wasn’t convinced that the family was even poor. The donors each probably spent between $75 and $300 and was easily affordable for all of them. But the whole effort left a sour taste for most of the dozen or so donors.
What the donors got that the Salvation Army doesn’t offer is the opportunity to meet the family. (That’s also what many of the Toys for Tots volunteers get.) What they lost was the goodwill that could have turned a modest collective effort into an annual neighborhood tradition.
One formal adopt-a-family story.
When I floated the idea in the office I was working in, all but one of my co-workers walked (ran?) away from me. One of the “Ts” was eager to help and welcomed the opportunity to buy a toy for a poor child. She contacted the Salvation Army that supplied a list of families remaining in need for “adoption.” As most of the cost would fall on me, “T” agreed that we would only consider the small families. We eliminated from our consideration those requesting expensive gifts. (Today’s version of i-pads and i-phones.) The most modest of all families had our hearts. The little girl wanted a doll and the boy a truck. The mother some perfume and the father a shirt. I could do that with or without “T’s” help.
“T” did the shopping. I only added some some nice soaps to the list of what the mother had asked for, a package of Christmas cookies, and a small grocery store gift card. “T” stretched our dollars to get just a bit more for the children. We would wrap the gifts later in the office conference room. One by one our co-workers checked out what we were doing. A couple of the guys said, “Here’s ten bucks to make that gift card larger.” One woman said, “I was thinking that a new wallet would be nice for the mother.” Encouraged by “T” and my positive response, she went and bought one. (Please understand that this was the first time this mid-fifty year old woman had ever donated to anything.)
The next day, the office tightwad, showed up with a ceramic angel she’d made that she wanted to give the little girl. Then added, “I was thinking that the father could use a new belt.” That bowled me over. Another guy handed us some money saying, “Get the kids a bit more.” The other “T” helped wrap. One of the other guys offered to deliver the “pack” to the Salvation Army. Everybody in the office ended up contributing in some way and only in a way that they were comfortable doing. Collectivism has a way of making we mortals just a bit better for a moment.
Still, we would have liked to have met the family. Not for any thank yous from them. Not to be present when they opened the gifts. Nor even to be identified to them as the donors. Just something more than our own imagination of “our family” that also preserved the dignity of the family.
Something more like what may be but a once in a lifetime experience: A Magical Christmas