When we are all bloated with excess…you know…the kids excitedly opening shit they don’t need (ours are getting a Wii!). All feeling very proud of ourselves while we stuff our pieholes with turkey and cake and pie and lament the ‘holiday pounds’ that we put on every year. But no worries, come January every fucking gym in the western world will get their January bump as we all line up like cattle to work off those pounds. Swearing up and down that we’ll finally lose that extra 10 pounds or stop smoking or what ever bullshit habit of excess we carry with us year to year. If that isn’t the spirit of Christmas, then what is….
Maybe just maybe a few of us could do something a tad different this year. Maybe one or two people could remember the spirit of the season. Even those of us with no real religious aspect to the season maybe we could be more the person we think we want to be and less the person we really are to the world.
Maybe instead of the gift card to “You have to much shit” store we could send Dolls to little boys and girls displaced by a government who moves them to refugee camps because they just ARE. Handmade, fair trade.
I screw up all the time, if I lived in Bolivia and was sent to jail…guess who would come with me, my CHILDREN! Yep, mainly kids under 6 but others much older because they don’t have anywhere else to go, so they stay in jail. Now Bolivians have to rent there rooms in jail (there are no cells) and the whole family lives within that room. You know, next to mr. rapist and murderer. So I’m not asking you to stop going to Starbucks, because you won’t. But to put in plain language, 4 cafe lattes equal toys for the kindergarten. So you could send it and pretend you’ll go to Starbucks 4 less times. Same thing.
For some reason people like to say that ‘well if i’m giving i’d rather give close to home’ as if that’s somehow more important. Well to be fair, if just SEEING in person the pain and suffering of others stirred us into action then our own backyards would be in much better shape. The very fact that we have all these issues of homelessness, thousands of adoptable children in foster care , the treatment of the mentally ill, the neglect of our older citizen means that in fact we don’t give a rats ass about what happens in our own home cities and countries. For gods sake they put children and dogs (different days) on the news at noon in Edmonton hoping that someone out there will take them home. We have websites full of adoptable foster kids with cute little doe eyes on our computers everyday. (no I didn’t find my middle kid that way, but close). So clearly just seeing the problem doesn’t stir us into action. But for the people that seriously think this makes a difference why not something like LUSH’s charity pot gives to charities all over the globe including North America. Plus you get amazing body lotion at the same time…
I always loved those Salvation Army shoe boxes. You could put personal items in them and they would shipped off all over the world. Loved that idea. But the idea of all that shipping stuff drove me crazy! The sheer number of airplanes that had to fly those supplies all over the world just made me crazy. I much prefer the idea of sending the money equivalent to two hens and a rooster (for example). Then I don’t imagine all the fuel and green house gases as I’m filling the damn shoe box. Yes I realize I’m weird, but here I am washing and hanging my diapers and then be perfectly okay with planes and planes full of plastic toys and deodorant from the dollar store to make 1 or 2 days better instead of changing a life…yeh, that bugged me.
And for all you bitter people out there who see no point in putting your hand out to others, what could be better than giving the gift of CRABS in the name of that ex-boyfriend/girlfriend who cheated on you back in 1994? There really is something for everyone!
Even if all this falls on deaf ears I still feel better for saying it. Yep, my kids will still get the Wii. Because I want them to have it, we are buying the sports games and I’m desperately looking forward to evenings swinging the tennis racket and playing dance dance revolution in a fit of giggles. They are also giving something else this year. Maybe this year it’ll be Sari Bari bag made by a woman who is no longer held captive as a sex slave.
Because it is the season.
I asked Emmett today if that made me cool. You know seeing a movie, and then knitting the pair of mitts one character was wearing on the screen for like 4 minutes. Of course he said that he can’t imagine anything cooler. (when he said it, it sounded like ‘oh god, you’re such a loser’ but I know what he meant). So I’m rushing through this pair of socks with a determination I haven’t had for knitting in a long time. Funny how your passion can get turned up again….
