If we had nothing to give

With the Christmas season upon us, I find my mind drawn more and more to the holiday…more specifically I find myself drawn more and more to the gift giving side of the holiday. I’ve already written several things about how our society wants more and more and how we encourage coveting in our children by fulfilling their Christmas wish lists. But now I find my mind going a different direction.

What if we had to celebrate Christmas with little or no money. And no, I’m not talking about having little money but still having even 20.00 to spend…I’m thinking about getting through Christmas with literally no money.

As I was driving in town the other day I saw a man standing on the side of the road holding a sign that said he was homeless. I’ve seen many people doing that before, it wasn’t a new experience for me but…there was something different about that man. I don’t know what it was…but he was different. Even now, the memory of that man stays with me.

I know nothing of his life story, know nothing of him, beyond what I saw that day. And what I’ve written here is pretty much all I know…except that I know he had on a gray sweatshirt and…I think…a pair of jeans. That’s it. That is everything I know about the man who I still remember long after the time I should have forgotten him.

But…as my mind turns more and more to Christmas…I remember that man. In a whole lot of ways. What if that man needed to give Christmas to his family this year? What if he truly has nothing with which to buy them even the cheapest thing from a dollar store. What if…

What if someone had to celebrate Christmas and had nothing to celebrate it with?

There are programs for children in low income families, programs that supply toys to those children. Those programs are wonderful but…the parents are often given what someone else decides to give them. I’ve known mothers that sign their children up for those programs and wound up getting something their child would never use. I know of one child that…at the age of 6…was put on the Christmas Angel Tree. That child received clothes that were ten times too big and a few small toys that didn’t come close to being something the child would enjoy.

Because of the rules surrounding the Christmas tree program that mother was prevented from signing her child up with any other organization and wound up with a collection of mostly useless things at a time when she needed gifts for her child.

But even at that…that mother had a program she could turn to. Most families, even when they have no money, have family that can help fill the gap. They have programs to sign up for. There are options.

But what happens when there aren’t any options?

What happens when the parent without money is the non-custodial parent and therefore doesn’t qualify for the programs offered to low income children? What happens when the person with no money is an aunt or uncle, spending Christmas with nieces and nephews that won’t understand why ‘auntie’ or ‘uncle’ didn’t give them anything for Christmas? What happens when the person is prevented in any way from accessing what the rest of the world takes for granted?

My grandmother is currently living in a nursing home. She cannot leave even if she wants to. There are no stores within the nursing home for her to shop in. If she knew her great grandchild was coming to visit for Christmas and she wanted to give it a present…what could she do? Or what if she had made a very dear friend inside the nursing home and wished to give that friend a gift…what could she give?

What of the person that’s hospitalized, with no family to do any shopping for them? How will they acquire presents for those they may wish to give a gift to?

What of the teenager living in foster care? With no money and possibly a home where the ‘parents’ won’t supply gifts for them to give?

What of the prisoner in prison that may have access to a store…with limited offerings…but isn’t allowed to mail anything to family?

What of the elderly or handicapped person that cannot leave their home?

What of…

There are probably a million reasons why someone may be going through Christmas with truly no way to celebrate it.

I’ve been a parent with a child in the hospital. I learned real quick that it didn’t matter how much money I had or didn’t have. Because I was unwilling to leave my child alone, unless family came to the hospital, I was completely stuck. I couldn’t even go to the gift shop. I was depended on what the hospital provided, which doesn’t always give any consideration to the parent.

What if my child had been hospitalized over Christmas?

What if I had no family or friends to rely on during that time?

What then?

I did have family and I never had a child in the hospital over Christmas but there are those that find themselves in exactly that situation. Sometimes desperate situations crop up not because we don’t have money but because of circumstances. And sometimes it is because there is exactly no money to be had.

I recently saw a description of a Christmas movie that said a widowed dad of five children was able to come up with one dollar for him and his children to split between them in order to give presents to each other for Christmas. I don’t know when the movie was set, and haven’t seen the movie, but the concept is…staggering.

What if you had only 1.00 to spend on Christmas? In our day and time that seems like such a trivial amount that there is simply no way you could use it to provide even one present much less gifts for everyone you love. But…imagine you had only 1.00 to use for giving gifts…how would you use it? What could you possibly give?

What if the person you love most in the world is in some kind of isolation, unable to receive a gift…what could you give them?

When you have nothing to give, or they’re allowed to receive nothing…what can you give?

But the problem doesn’t stop with what you can give…it goes into what will the other person be happy to receive. If I were to take that one dollar and buy for just my closest family members…I’d have maybe .10 per person to spend…there is nothing out there that .10 will buy that anyone I know will be happy to get. Most of them would rather have nothing than to have what could be bought with .10. Even if I upped the amount to 1.00 per person…most people would not be all that happy with anything a dollar can buy.

Imagine having nothing with which to supply Christmas…and knowing those you’re giving gifts to won’t in any way appreciate what little you can buy with what money you can manage to scrape together.

Where is the joy in Christmas…in people…in experiences…that once existed?

One year when my sisters were young my mother couldn’t afford much of anything. She was literally raking up pennies for the gas it took to drive them to school and had nothing to put into Christmas presents. On top of that, because of a fairly recent move, they had no Christmas decorations of any kind.

My young sisters made a paper Christmas tree, hung it on the wall, and drew decorations on it. They made other paper decorations. There were a handful of second hand gifts under the paper tree with no hope of anything else.

But you know what…I’m fairly sure my sisters still remember that Christmas.

Sometimes the things we must work the hardest for, the things we least expect, mean the most to us.

I was recently asked by someone that has no access to Christmas decorations for a picture of a Christmas tree. I truly think that single request will stay with me forever. It struck me as so…simple…so profound. In a world that is never satisfied with what it has, in a world where we can literally have anything we want and usually with very little wait…this person wanted a picture of a Christmas tree.

My daughter has a friend that travels extensively. It is what this family does. They have been to many, many countries. The parents in this family have ‘adopted’ a child through one of those ‘sponsor a child’ programs. I think they actually ‘adopted’ more than one. But this one child, a girl of about 10 or 12, was from Mexico. During a trip this family took to Mexico they went to visit the girl.

What a wonderful experience for all of them.

But what strikes me today, as I write this, is what the family chose to take to this girl as a gift. They picked a very expensive doll, one that comes from a popular company here in America, and took it as a gift to this girl that they were meeting, a girl that they were supporting through a program for poverty stricken children.

As I write this the contrast in those two things…almost a collision of two very different worlds…stands out to me in such a remarkable way. We have a well to do American family, choosing expensive gifts as if giving to an American child, and taking that gift to a child that lives in such poverty. This child would have probably been thrilled with receiving the cheapest of toys from America…in fact the child will probably have been happy with a visit from her ‘family’ even without any gifts. But they shopped for the girl as they would their own daughter.

I have little doubt that the girl enjoyed the wonderful gift she was given. I imagine it was unlike anything else she had ever had, maybe unlike anything she had ever seen. And now it was her very own. And yet…how much could the money spent on that expensive American toy provide for that child? Food? Schooling? Necessities? Clothing?

And which would the girl have appreciated more in the long run? The doll, purchased because this families daughter liked that type of doll, or something to improve her living conditions?

I don’t know the answer to that question. And I very well may have made a similar choice if I had been in a similar situation as this family…but I can’t help seeing the contrast in that one example. A poverty stricken child, receiving aide through an international organization, provided for by an American family…and a gift chosen from the more affluent side of American culture. Yes, I’m sure there are more expensive gifts out there but I’m also certain there are many, many American families that cannot afford the doll that was given to this child.

It was a high dollar gift for a poverty stricken child.

I was recently in a place where I heard a woman tell a small boy of three or four that he wasn’t getting anything else to eat. He had chicken in his hand and his mother in a half apologetic, half disgusted way explained to me that he had gotten item after item to eat and he wasn’t eating any of it. She said he was simply wasting food. Then she said…’there are children starving’. This is a concept our country knows exists but is rarely a part of our everyday lives. That little boy did not know hunger or he wouldn’t have wasted the first bit of food that had been bought for him.

I understood the mother’s frustrations, for one thing we were in a place where food is expensive, for another thing I have a son that has done the same thing since he started eating real food as a baby.

But the very habit of American children in their eating habits…the picky eating, the eating only small amounts of their food and wanting more later, are all things that are not seen in children that go without food.

I once knew a young woman that would not eat after anyone else, would not eat anything that fell on the floor or touched a countertop. When this young woman at about the age of 20 moved out of her family’s home and started living on her own. Once on her own she went through some very hard times and experienced true hunger.

One day this young woman was visiting my home and one of my children dropped some candy on the floor, this young woman scooped it up and ate it quickly, eagerly…hungrily. If I remember correctly it was even a type of candy this girl had never liked but experience had taught her to eat what was available.

As I remember that day, I think of the young girl living in poverty that got a very expensive doll. And I think of our American society and how we perceive so many wants as needs. I can’t count the number of times I’ve gone shopping for clothes for my family, saying they needed this or that while they had plenty of clothes at home.

Just about everytime I go grocery shopping I say we need groceries when in fact, we still have plenty of food, we just happen to be out of certain foods.

This is a mindset that we, in America, have developed. We have food but it isn’t what we want so we ‘need’ more. We have clothes but maybe they have a stain or a small hole or there’s something a bit better and so we ‘need’ clothes.

During a recent trip to the thrift store the donation area seemed to be swamped under the donations coming in. Where there is normally only a few bags or boxes, because this area is maintained throughout the day, there were piles and piles of things. It almost appeared as if the store was overflowing. This is an unusual situation at this particular store. The time of year was my first assumption for the large amount of donations.

With Christmas coming…I assumed…people are going through their children’s toy boxes, bedrooms, even their entire homes, and purging what they no longer want to make room for the new things they will receive.

This often works in the favor of those that do their Christmas shopping at thrift stores. That overflow of donations will soon reach the shelves and give those holiday shoppers more things to choose their gifts from.

But that very concept is something that most people would turn their noses up at. Christmas presents, it’s generally understood, are supposed to be new.

It’s more of that American mentality that makes us think things should be a certain way when they don’t always have to be. And it’s an example of the mentality that makes the majority of people where they would not appreciate the used gift, the 1.00 gift, the found gift, or whatever other gift the person that truly had no money might be able to give.

I think of someone with very little or no money, think of all the thought and effort they would have to put into their gift…and I can’t help thinking that that person would put more effort into the gifts they give than the person with money to afford what they want to buy puts into their gifts.

For years in our house one of our favorite holiday television shows was an episode where a pioneer family worked and struggled through giving Christmas presents to each other. They bought what they could, traded skills they had to acquire presents for family, even gave up their most prized things to trade for gifts.

That may have been a television show but it’s easy to see that the harder you have to work, the more you have to give up, the more thought you put into the gift you give. I spent a couple of years where I refused to buy any presents. I made all the gifts I gave and only bought what was needed to make those gifts.

I well remember the long hours, the thought, and the work that went into each of those gifts. I remember, too, how much more I enjoyed giving those gifts than the gifts I have given in all the other years.

But even as I worked hard to make those gifts…I had the money to buy the supplies. What of the person that has no money? The child that the best they have to give is a picture they drew? The person with no money that scrounges through their things and finds a gift for everyone, painstakingly cleaning and preparing each gift? What of the elderly person in a nursing home whose best present is the package of crackers they so want for themselves? What of the prisoner whose best gift may be a letter written on borrowed paper?

Does the recipient take the time to notice how much that single gift is worth? Do they understand that that gift may well be worth more than all the hundred dollar gifts one could buy?

Do we as gift givers put everything we have into each gift, making it count? Or do we simply toss money toward that ‘want’ on someone’s list? Whether we put money, time, thought, or effort into our gifts do they count?

At this time of year so many stores line their shelves with gift sets. They’re usually packaged in holiday boxes and are a quick easy way to get a gift for someone. Even the person that has everything can use a boxed set of jelly or a foot bath…right? But when those gifts are given…does the giver really think of the person receiving it? Or are they simply thinking of what’s easiest to give?

And when we receive a gift…do we show appreciation for everything we get…no matter how small or insignificant? And do we understand as we hold that child’s drawing in our hands that what we’re being given is worth more than all the gifts money can buy? Do we understand that the child is giving us all they have to give? Do we understand when we visit ‘grandpa’ in the nursing home and receive a packet of salt as a gift, that that gift may well be all he has to give, and that in order for him to give us that package of salt…he had to go without to give it to us?

I remember one year my mother received a pie plate from her brother and sister in law. Her sister in law loved the pie plate. She took on over it so much that Christmas. She talked of how much she wanted it and how she figured my mother would too. This woman gave a gift she truly wanted.

My mother didn’t like it. She had no use for it and never used it. In fact she left it in the box and when Christmas rolled around the next year…she gave it back to her sister in law. That gift was well received the second time around. It had been given out of one woman’s desire for the gift and was received with much happiness out of that same desire.

How many gifts are given each year that aren’t wanted by the recipient? How many people wish they could give a gift but have nothing to give? Or think they have nothing to give.

If we truly had nothing…what would we have to give? What could we give to those we love?