Beyond Rivalry

Mike Todd at "Waving or Drowning?" talks about his faith community's decision to think and act differently about "The Shopping Frenzy Formally Known as Christ's Birthday." (I love that the faith community is called "the whatever" -- to me, that implies a consciousness of always being in the process of becoming, of being fluid, of moving and growing moment to moment as called.)

"In our faith community (known affectionately as "the whatever") we've been spending a lot of time talking about what it means to be apprentices of Jesus. (Hang in there with me if you've heard this before.) Many of us have been believers for a long time, but we're no longer convinced that's what God had in mind. ... For a while now we've been holding on to Matthew 25, specifically the whole sheep and goats thing. We've been talking about becoming more involved, becoming 'gospel activists', making a difference, and reintegrating our faith into the real world and our real lives. We want to become the kinds of people who live out their faith, particularly towards to poor and disenfranchised, not just because we respond to external needs, but because we internally choose to live our lives that way. That takes practice."

One way to practice is to live Christmas -- and other occasions that seem to demand shopping, buying, giving, frenzy -- differently. His "the whatever" faith community will be giving half of what they would normally have given as gifts, with the other half of the money going to support worthy causes, some of which are listed in his weblog entry: The Stephen Lewis Foundation, which works to bring justice to the reality of HIV/AIDS in Africa; Dignitas International, a medical humanitarian NGO founded by international health and research experts to respond to the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, which is making antiretroviral drugs available to people in Malawi; opportunities available through the World Vision Gift Catalogue, like a year of schooling for a child or a goat for a family; and Linwood House Ministries, which seeks to restore "God’s value of women of the world" by praying for and actively helping suffering women worldwide.

They will also be suggesting this practice to anyone who asks them "what do you want for Christmas?"

Some alternative gifts I've given over the years or plan to give, and purveyors of alternative gifts, are listed below:

• Anonymously pay someone's oil, car repair, medical, or other bill. This generally requires that you have a relationship with the person whose bill you are paying (so you know that they have the bill and to whom its paid), but not so close that they will guess it's you!

• Anonymously pay someone's large library fine, or pay small fines for many people.

• Buy gift certificates to local restaurants, independent bookshops, natural food stores, and other shops and either give them anonymously to total strangers and acquaintances (find their addresses in the phone book or online) or to friends and family.

• Give a gift to or membership in a charitable organisation in a friend or family member's name. Some I like:
  
  
  • Animal Rescue (where, for example, you can feed a rescued horse for a week, two weeks, or a month, with a certificate going to the person of your choice to let them know you are doing this in their honour or in someone's memory)
  
  
  • the other "Sites": Breast Cancer Site ; Hunger Site; Child Health Site; Literacy Site; and Rainforest Site
  
  
  • your local animal shelter or the Morris Animal Foundation, which funds humane animal research to advance veterinary medicine
  
  
  • health education and research organisations (American Lung Association; Cystic Fibrosis; ALS Assocation; American Cancer Society; Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières)
  
  
  • locals arts institutions and museums or The National Museum of Women in the Arts, The National Museum of the American Indian, or The National Holocaust Museum
  
  
  • local, national and international environmental organisations such as The Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund, The Ocean Conservancy, the Rainforest Alliance, Rails to Trails Conservancy.
    
  
  
  • peace- and justice-promoting organisations, such as Adopt-A-Minefield; Amnesty International (preventing human rights abuses worldwide); the Catholic peace-promotion organisation Pax Christi USA, which works against war and for disarmament and social justice; Ploughshares Fund, a grant-making foundation that works to prevent the spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and conflicts that could lead to their use.
  
  
  • organisations providing support for U.S. troops in the Middle East
  
  
  • botanical and public gardens such as the New York Botanical Garden, the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, Wave Hill Gardens in the Bronx, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew (UK), the Desert Botanical Garden in Arizona, the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard (Mass.). Give visitors' passes to those who live near public gardens such as Longwood Gardens (PA).
    
  
  
  • organisations providing help to alleviate poverty and hunger, and working to provide humanitarian relief, such as those working to alleviate the crisis in the Sudan, providing emergency relief and reconstruction aid in Iraq; Oxfam America (or the U.K. based Oxfam International), which works to "develop lasting solutions to poverty, hunger, and social injustice;" Bread for the World, a movement of American Christians "seeking justice for the world's hungry people by lobbying our nation's decision makers."
  
  

• Buy someone in your community a share or half-share of locally farmed food through a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm in your area.

• Donate money to the local food bank in the recipient's name, and give the recipient a gift basket of locally bought foods (and/or homemade foods) as a token of the donation; or give them an invitation to a meal at your house.

  
  

• Give a green tag in someone's honour/memory to offset your energy resource expenditures during the year. The money donated supports the development of clean renewable energy. Some sources: Bonneville Environmental Foundation, Native Energy (to support wind power only), Blue Sky Energy (which calls them green certificates; available throughout the U.S.), Maine Interfaith Power & Light (in Maine), Oregon Interfaith Power & Light (in Oregon, Washington, Montana and Wyoming).

• Local libraries often offer books for "adoption" -- you pay the book's price and a label goes in the front with whatever commemoration you choose.

• Adopt an animal in someone's honour or memory. My favourites are Elephant Sanctuary; Save the Manatee; Adopt-A-Rhino through SOS Rhino (desperate need); Adopt-A-Turkey (to live out its life at Farm Sanctuary's New York or California shelters, or, if you want, at your home, depending on your home's suitability); Adopt-A-Bird (go to the bottom of the Adopt-A-Bird page for links to stories about each individual bird; this organisation is great and offered my recipients a tour of the new facilities when they were in the area; there must be an incident behind this note on their webpage: "Please note that Adopt-a-Bird is a wildlife sponsorship program -- you or your gift recipient do not receive the actual bird!") or Adopt a Raptor at Vermont Institute of Natural Sciences (VINS); the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund's Adopt-A-Gorilla.

• Promise a monthly lunch date with local friends or family, and a monthly letter to friends or family far away. Offer to take a friend's child to the local library's storyhour once or twice a month.

• Give the gift of lessons, and your time. Offer to teach someone how to do anything you do well -- playing an instrument, cooking or baking, gardening, auto mechanics, sewing, knitting, online travel planning, a language, a craft, tennis or fishing lessons, child care, organisational skills and techniques, poetry appreciation, carpentry, plumbing ... the list is long!

• If you read well, read a book or story(ies) on tape for someone. (If it's a long story or a book, it's easier on the voice to record the reading over a number of days or even weeks -- so start early!)

• Collect your favourite recipes and give them as a gift. I've done this on a set of index cards, hand-writing and illustrating the recipes (start a month ahead!). A recipe collection could also be created in a software program that runs on the recipient's computer.

• The Center for a New American Dream's "Simplify the Holidays" campaign has lots of ideas, including many for kids' gifts.

• Alternative Gifts International offers "35 life-sustaining, worldwide projects to honor family and friends," including saving a mountain gorilla in Rwanda; job training for impoverished women in the US; rescuing victims of forced prostitution in Southeast Asia; micro-loans for small businesses in Haiti and the Ukraine; eye care and glasses for women and children threatened with blindness in Nepal and Bangladesh; and rescuing a coral reef in Jamaica.

• The Heifer Project offers gifts of honeybees, goats, water buffalo, ducks, sheep , rabbits, a "knitting basket" (four wool-producing animals), seeds, a tree, etc., to people around the world, to help alleviate suffering and poverty and to promote self-reliance, sustainability, strong communities, environmental protection, and peace.

• Sponsor a financially impoverished child in the U.S. or internationally with a small monthly donation through Christian Children's Fund or similar organisations.

• Give a public transportation advocate or train lover (in the U.S.) a membership in the National Association of Railroad Passengers to benefit the recipient and the cause of passenger trains in the U.S.
  

• Give a charitable donation through JustGive, which allows you to make a gift online to your choice of more than 1,000,000 nonprofits across the U.S. You can also set up your own Charity Wish List and ask the people who want to give you a gift to choose a charity from the list.

• Give a gift to the Earth: Take a couple of plastic bags with you to pick up litter on your walks this fall or winter.