As we all know, Christmas sucks.
Too much commercialization. Too much (or, rather, too little) money. Too much fruitcake (bleh!).
Too many fist fights over the last parking space at the mall. Too many Saturday night office parties, followed by the Monday morning summons from HR.
Too many craft fairs, whether they be the school-gym variety where you pay $8 for a set of homemade oven mitts knitted from flammable material, or the oh-so-twee affairs where they sell $40 quinoa-based fudge and where you have to avoid eye contact with the anxious-looking vendor desperate to sell his $800 blown-glass garden rakes, and where everybody makes a fuss when you quite justifiably start throwing elbows when it gets too crowded.
Most of all: too much stress. This week, pollster Mario Conseco wrote in Business in 91原创 that three in 10 91原创s think this Christmas will be “more stressful than fun.” An Australian psychologist once compared Christmas stress to road rage, and Britain’s Daily Telegraph once reported that one in 20 Britons consider the day more traumatic than a burglary.
Why all the pressure? Longtime TC readers will know that I blame Martha Stewart. Christmas was actually kind of fun up until the 1990s when Martha barged in and ruined things by making us feel like it was not only possible but mandatory to have a perfect Christmas, one where nobody gets drunk or burns the turkey or has a mismatched manger scene where one of the wise men is missing its head and baby Jesus has been replaced by a Luke Skywalker figurine. Eventually Martha was sent to jail for this (OK, technically the charges related to stock trading) but by then the damage was done.
It’s another prison-based story that gives me pause, though.
This one dates back five years, to the time the Times 91原创 Christmas Fund received a cheque from a trust account maintained on behalf of inmates at the 91原创 Island Regional Correctional Centre — Wilkie, as it’s more commonly known. When we asked, the Public Safety Ministry confirmed that the donation came from an unidentified prisoner.
What stood out was the amount of the cheque: $7. That’s a very specific number.
It’s not easy to earn money when incarcerated. At the time of the inmate’s donation, the Public Safety Ministry said prisoners could get paid for certain work — cleaning or painting, for example — but that they generally earned only between $1.50 and $6.50 per shift, depending on how much responsibility, experience and skill was required. In other words, it could take a day, or even a few days, to earn $7.
There’s a Bible story known as The Widow’s Mite in which Jesus, after watching a succession of rich people donate to the temple treasury, sees a woman add two small coins, or mites. He tells his disciples that, in fact, the poor widow had put in more than all the other donors put together, for while they had all made contributions from their surplus wealth, she had given all she had. For some people, seven bucks might as well be $700.
We all have our preferred causes to support, and we all have a different capacity to support them. We also have different motivations for opening our wallets; for some it’s done with a resentful sense of duty, for others it’s done with joy, or gratitude.
Last year the Christmas Fund received a donation from a 95-year-old Parksville woman whose contribution was a response to the help she received in 1965 after landing in Victoria as a single mother with little more than three mouths to feed.
Another donation came in from a man who, 39 years ago, was helped by the Christmas Fund at a time when he was a struggling single father of two, living in the Cridge centre. “More than the extra food and toys it provided, the generosity of strangers renewed my faith in my fellow Victorians and mankind in general,” he wrote last year. “To me that was the real spirit of Christmas at work.”
It turns out that Christmas doesn’t have to suck after all.
HOW TO DONATE TO THE CHRISTMAS FUND
• Go online to . That page is linked to CanadaHelps, which is open 24 hours a day and provides an immediate tax receipt.
• Use your credit card by phoning 250-995-4438 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday through Friday.
• Cheques should be made out to the Times 91原创 Christmas Fund. Drop them at the Times 91原创 office in Vic West, 201-655 Tyee Road, Victoria.
• Contact Maximum Express for free pickup and delivery of your cheque. Call dispatch at 250-721-3278 or email [email protected].
The Times 91原创 Christmas Fund 2024 fundraising campaign has received $871,518.25 as of Saturday.
>>> To comment on this article, write a letter to the editor: [email protected]
