12 Acts of Christmas Kindness

Joyce at From This Side of the Pond started this challenge at the end of November. What a lovely idea I thought. So here we go.

My first thought was take pictures of everything and they needed to be big. That shortly went to the wayside when I realized that acts of kindness can be small as you will soon see.

Here's the ones that I have photos of first.

1. Donate food to the buildings food drive. They were collecting food for three local organizations.




2. Being a Secret Santa for a foster child. For the past ten years our family has adopted a child through the Secret Santa program that provides foster children in our county with gifts. We started out getting a child Whitney's age so she could buy things but as she got older we went for the little girls. This year I had a girl who wanted a baby doll and dress up clothes.



We always make sure to get them some warm clothes too and everyone needs cute pajamas.

But these first two I do every year. Can I really count them?

No more pictures now.

3. Put money in the red kettle. I usually don't carry cash so I don't do this, but this year I made sure to empty my spare change into a kettle.

4. Put extra in the parking meter when shopping so the next person won't have to pay. Unfortunately our town is looking at new meters that reset themselves when a car pulls away and this won't be able to be done anymore.

5. Volunteer extra hours at church for the big Christmas Spectacular. I've written several times about this.

It was about this time that I realized that small gestures are just as kind.

6. Hold a baby in the church bathroom so the mother can clean its nose. See a small gesture but the mom couldn't have done it without me.

7. Make sure that the elderly and disabled got seated safely for the Spectacular. When there were the crowds we had, this was very important.

8. Park far away in the parking lot so others could park close.

9. Make a suggestion at work that perhaps meant a student would get an assistantship to get a graduate degree. This actually could change a life.

And here I am with three more to go and I don't know what to say. I'm sure I did things but they are part of my normal life and how I treat people. I would like to think that I'm a kind person. So I'll stop the list and say even though I don't list twelve, I'm sure that I did at least that many.

I think the important thing is to continue to be kind all the time and not have to rely on being the Christmas holidays to make you be kind.