The Jacket
Each Wednesday, Tristan brings home a folder from school. It contains things like school work, behavior charts, PTA notices, notes from school, etc. This past Wednesday, the folder included a request to “Help Light Someone’s Christmas”. Basically, it’s the same concept as the Salvation Army’s angel tree: you sign up to purchase a gift for a specific amount and send the gift to the school.
Now we typically help various organizations, from giving in church to volunteering in various things, to sending canned goods to feed people who apparently only eat at Thanksgiving, to making donations, etc. Even with all of that, we have never received joy from giving. In fact, we hate giving. It’s like a chore. We do it though for various reasons — whether political or religious or otherwise. But because I love Heard Elementary School, I wanted to sign up immediately.
Kimberlie tried to throttle me back. We’re already room parents for Tristan’s class. We donate classroom supplies and send paper money and sell wrapping paper and buy BBQ tickets and support the PTA, so I understood her concern. But being room parents, we’ve met all of Tristan’s classmates. If there is someone in Tristan’s class, school, or our community who needs a token gift to improve their holiday season, I want to help. I filled out the form and committed to purchasing a gift at the $15.00 level and returned the form.
The next day, Kimberlie was picking up the kids from day care when Tristan handed her a paper light bulb. It said “Jacket for a 6 year old girl, size 6/7″. Her eyes teared up. We don’t live in a wealthy community, but it is the suburbs and I never imagined that someone nearby might not even have a jacket. We thought we were going to be purchasing a token gift for a child who might not have as many toys on Christmas morning as our kids, but instead, we were purchasing a necessity that in our household would never be considered a gift. And so we were off — to find the perfect jacket!
Being the bargain-hunter than I am, we ended up with a $40.00 Old Navy jacket. All of their outerwear was 50% off plus I used a 30% Stuff-n-Save discount to end up spending $14.00. It could possibly end up being the nicest garment the unknown little girl owns. Tristan’s birthday is coming up later this week and we actually enjoyed shopping for this unknown child more than we enjoyed shopping for our own child. The jacket has already warmed our hearts — for the first time since I can remember, we feel good about giving.
Let’s hope the little girl can stay warm until Christmas!
November 30th, 2011 at 7:18 pm
[...] there. I needed some jeans and we needed to pick up our gifts to donate to the kid’s school as we do every year. The only issue: “quantities are extremely [...]