A Giving Christmas

Do you remember when you were a child?  How you looked forward to Christmas and thought it would never come?   You felt like it took forever and the days crawled by painfully slowly until finally the big day arrived.  Santa had left the one thing you wanted most in the world in your stocking and if it wasn't what you wanted you loved it anyway because it was Christmas and Santa had come and you had received a gift.


Did you look forward with eager anticipation to your next birthday?  You just couldn't wait to grow up and do the fun, grown up things your older siblings or cousins did?  Then one day you woke up and you were grown up and you wondered why you hadn't savored those carefree days of childhood and clung to them just a little longer.


Now you blink twice and another blasted birthday is descending on you.  You try really hard to ignore it but then someone will always remember and tell the world you are a year older.  Now you realize being grown up means having responsibilities and heartaches and disappointments.  It really isn't just about the fun things you imagined as a child.


Christmas has become a time of stress when your budget gets blown and you can look forward to juggling your bills and economizing for at least six months after the big day is over.  How many times have you asked yourself,"Why oh why do I do it". 


I believe we have lost the true meaning of Christmas and everything has become too commercialized.  I also believe it is up to us to change that; to say "NO MORE".  That is why this Christmas my family is doing things a little differently.


This Christmas there will be our traditional Christmas dinner but, there will be a bowl on the table and instead of giving each other expensive gifts each person will put what they can afford into an envelope and write the name of the charity they want that money to go to on the envelope and place it in the bowl.  We only have one child in our family and he will get his Santa and gifts from everyone but, hopefully that child will learn that Christmas is about giving and not go through life thinking it is about taking.