Posted by
AudiR10TDI on Thursday, December 28, 2006 9:59:54 AM
December 28, 2006 -- Another year has passed on and it's time to think of what we can do to make 2007 better than 2006. My theme today is charity -- caritas -- which is what Bob Cratchitt meant when he said to his wife "My dear, have some charity!" after she made bitter remarks about her husband's employer, Ebenezer Scrooge, and not what is meant by modern organizations who beg us to throw large heaps of money at TheMostVulnerableAmongUs lest they hit us over the head and take it away from us anyway.
One thing I've noticed during the barrage of begging that signals Christmas these days is that practically every organization wants at least $25 and they all want you to buy expensive new electronics and goodies for their particular group of Pitiful Pearls. Lots of us are living from paycheque to paycheque, supporting elderly parents or slipping a little cash into the pockets of struggling family members, and writing cheques for large sums or buying expensive goodies for TheMostVulnerableAmongUs on top of that is beyond our reach. So many times people just toss those begging screeds into the trash can and sigh.
There is a way to practice charity without bankrupting yourself. In our family we had two: the Cussing Jar and the Christmas Jar. The Cussing Jar, which is adorned with those symbols used in comic strips and by polite people to indicate words for which Mama would have slapped us, is where we deposited the Least Coin we had on us when we said a bad word. (Okay, if we were feeling especially guity or had said lots of bad words, we dropped in the biggest coin.) The money in that jar was given to the local Senior Centre on a regular basis and sometimes it amounted to a very nice donation indeed.
The Christmas Jar is a little bit different. In that jar went all the 'stray money': pennies and nickels and dimes the kids picked up on the street or in the subway station or on the floor of the car; change Mama found behind the sofa cushions when she cleaned; odd pennies that had drifted to the bottom of our purses. It was fun to watch the level of change rise in that jar all year and to count it and marvel at how much money people literally 'threw away'. In later years I have taken to adding my odd pennies; for example, buying the paper from the box instead of at the news agent saves me 3 cents a day, so 15 cents a week goes into the Christmas Jar. When I'm looking for a package of meat at the store, I look for the cheapest one I can find and deposit the few pennies I save. This year I was able to give almost $12 to the Salvation Army and it didn't cost me a thing. Next year I anticipate doing better. Yesterday I found 27 cents at the subway station. That's a good start for 2007.
P.S. I have also found that my habit of picking up newspapers and trash from the seats around me on the subway train to deposit in the recycling on the way up the steps has yielded coins on occasion. In fact, once it yielded my grandson a $10 bill. Besides showing caritas, tidiness and the wish not to live in a pigsty can pay.
So if you are among those living on your income in 2007, think about starting a Christmas Jar and giving that money to charity. It'll be an adventure and it won't cost you a thing.