What's the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about Christmas? Gifts? Family and Friends? Food? Snow? Santa Claus? A break from school? Jesus? Baby Jesus?
Christmas is a special time of year. All the lights and decorations and colors and evergreen trees and joys and memories make the Christmas season unique. In fact, there is no other time of year that creates as much excitement as Christmas.
Every year when I was a child, I would write a long list of things that I wanted for Christmas. It would include all the popular toys and gadgets that I could think of. Then, I would give it to my parents and wait with excitement and anticipation till Christmas morning. I wouldn't trade those memories for the world. As I got older, it became harder for me to think of a list of things that I wanted for Christmas. After thinking about it for a while, I discovered that I could only come up with 2 or 3 things: A new hat, a sweater, and a Starbucks gift card.
The last couple of years, I have found it increasingly difficult to get excited about Christmas gifts. It was challenging for me to recieve gifts and to give them to other people. Its not that I don't want to be generous, but I have a hard time buying gifts for people who have so much in comparison to the rest of the world. The statistics are astounding:
- 22,000 Children dye each day from starvation
- Almost half the world — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day
- Some 1.1 billion people in developing countries have inadequate access to water, and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation.
- Less than one per cent of what the world spent every year on weapons was needed to put every child into school by the year 2000 and yet it didn’t happen
So I began thinking about alternatives. I haven't spent much time compiling this list, but I do have a few ideas:
- Make homemade Christmas gifts that require more thought and creativity than spending a few bucks
- Write a letter to those you love letting them know how much you appreciate them and why.
- Buy fair trade Christmas gifts that help women in underpriveledge nations make a living. Globalgirlfriend.com is a great site that I used last year.
- Give a goat or some chickens to a family through an organization like Heifer International
- Somalia could really use your financial support and your prayers. You can give through organizations like UNICEF and CARE .
I began this post by asking, "What's the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about Christmas?" Now, I want to pose a different question. Image a starving little girl who is about 10 years old. You can see her ribs because the famine in her country is so severe. What do you think is the first thing that comes to her mind when she thinks about Christmas? Don't think your gift won't make a diffeence because it will. Reality is transformed when just one person chooses to stand up and do something about the suffering that is plauguing large parts of the world.
