Once a year my favorite holiday comes around. The Advent season has serioulsy got to be one of the most amazing times of the year. The whole meaning of Christmas is wonderful to begin with, but then there are all of these beautiful decorations that can keep a person awed for hours, days, weeks even (technically a little over a month).
It is also the one time of the year that I feel I have any sort of artistic and decorative ability what so ever. The Christmas tree is my piece of art in my family's house.
I start of course by assembly the tree. My family cannot have a real tree for health concerns, so we instead have bought a fairly lovely fake tree that we reassemble every year. If anyone else has ever decorated a fake tree then you will know that the fist thing you must do is shape the tree. This is the first step in my expertise. I must shape the tree in such a way that it looks full (so there are no "holes" in the tree), it looks real, and it looks beautiful of course.
Then the real job gets started that is putting the lights on the tree!!!! YAY!!! I must put lights on the tree so that it is fully lighted, not tacky, evenly distributed, and so that the wires of the lights remain unnoticed. I do this by stringing the lights up and down each individual branch so that the wire never moves from one branch to the other in the front of the limb, and each branch is wrapped in lights.
I know this sounds silly, but please indulge me...and hear me out on this. After 800 lights and about five hours of work I accomplished my job. The tree had lights! I then thought about how my beautiful creation would be ruined once the tacky ornaments that I made in elementary school would be placed upon my beautiful tree (remind me to find those and ruin them some day). I stood back in awe of my work, and began to think about what each little light on that tree would cost.
That Christmas tree with 800 lights will remain on 24/7 until about January first. I then thought about how most places in the world do not even have electricity 24/7 for normal everyday appliances. In Gaza there are frequent electrical outages, and people actually try to steal electricity from one another. Israel also uses electricity as a tool to punish the Palestinians, by cutting off the electricity to Gaza.
In Africa, many people still live in the brush and have no such luxuries. Others live in cities, but they are too poor to pay for the electricity. Others still have no access to it because of political and social instability.
I have mentioned places like India (where Dalits have lived in poverty for the past since before the state received its independence), South America, Latin America, the Caribbean (places like Jamaica where the IMF has ruined the local market and de-developed the country) or Haiti, or even America. Let's be honest I have two friends who grew up on farms here in the United States neither of which had/have electricity at home...yep that's right folks right here in the good ol' USA.
All of this said, I do not want it to be a bash on Christmas trees or Christmas decorations. Let us think when admiring our decorations and remember what Christmas is really about. Let us recognize that we are blessed to be able to afford those decorations, and let's think of those who cannot have them. Let's not take joy away from this time, but let's think of what they mean. Let's remember they mean that we are blessed, and we need to help those who are not. If you would like to take time to help a family this season here are some websites to check out if you do not already have plans....
http://www.gfa.org/kcbi
This is a place where you can purchase gifts for families in Asia. These gifts are gifts that will actually help raise the families socioeconomic status.
Other ideas for gifts...find a local charity and give the gift of your time!!! Forget about money for a few minutes and simply give the gift of time and love. Give the gift of life...donate blood. Adopt a child (okay I know that it is considered "trendy" right now to adopt a child, but seriously it's an amazing, amazing gift). Recently, I had the honor of hearing a man speak who was adopted when he was 11 and was given the opportunity to have a family and a future all in that continual act of love. His parents went on to adopt 17 more children. (I don't think most of us can do that, but maybe some of us could adopt one or two...every child counts).Visit a Veteran's Hospital. Okay, I will be the first to admit that I don't agree with the war...but let's get passed the politics and get to what's amazing...our vets.
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