All Things Holiday Thread!

[Gemme]

Originally Posted by Jar

The past few years my mom and I go shopping for toys and food. A few days before Christmas we go to several charities and make deliveries. It gives me the true feeling of the holiday. I want to carry on this new tradition this year too.

Love this.

I enjoy going to the stores that still participate in the Tree Angel program, where local kids in the system have cards with 'wants' (usually electronics or toys) and 'needs' (usually clothes) listed, along with their sizes and preferences. I pick a couple of angels when I can swing it and have a ball shopping for them.

For those that don't know, I was in the system for a couple of years and there was one children's home that I was assigned to that was absolutely fantastic for things like this. They had fundraisers and sent out the kids' 'wish lists' (we could put 10 things on the list and at least 5 of them HAD to be clothes/necessary things but the others could be anything we wanted to ask for) to their benefactors and for weeks before Christmas the kids would have to go to the mail center and bring back boxes and bags of stuff. The anticipation nearly drove us mad, especially the younger kids and first timers, but it really made us feel as if we weren't alone in this world; that people outside of our immediate families (for those that still had family members they were in contact with) knew we existed and cared if us kids had a 'good Christmas' or not.

It kind of brings up the whole over-commercialization of Christmas debate, but when you're 8 and your life has brought you to the point where you are basically a number in a file, just like everyone else, knowing that someone took a few minutes out of their day and a few bucks out of their pocket to do something FOR YOU, that's fucking amazing. And we were far more grateful for the things we received than most kids were.