The Book of Christmas Virtues (8 page)

And Mom offered us no sympathy.

“Be patient with your father,” she advised. “Someday, when you're grown up, you'll thank him for doing this.”

It turns out Mom was right.

Years after leaving home, I pawed through a box in her basement and discovered the Christmas pictures. I looked closely at each one and realized that, instinctively, Dad had almost replicated the poses each year. The changes were so minor that the photos resembled animation cells. I placed them in chronological order, earliest at the bottom, and began to flip through the years.

I notice how the images changed at the sides of the table where a highchair moved in and out of the frame like a ping-pong ball as each toddler grew out of it. Finally, Gretchen, Carolyn, Jan and I were all seated at the table. Seven frames later the high chair moved into place again with the family caboose, Bart. Our heights increased with the years and so did our hairstyles: from pixie, to beehive, to pageboy. We were always in Sunday dress, and Mom's clothes mirrored the decades.

But little changed at the head of the table.

With no evidence of him dashing to his own spot in front of the camera, Dad sported an every-hair-in-place military crew cut. He always wore a white shirt and a necktie that exactly matched his trousers. His left hand gripped an oversized fork impaling the turkey breast. His right hand held a knife poised to carve. It is a sign of the times when I see a white cord that stretched from a wall socket to Dad's new electric knife.

It's all there, captured year after year, as we held our places and our smiles, waiting for the Dad's diligently preset timer to click our pose.

My life story is told in those photographs, in all that is seen and unseen. And I smile, recalling the adage about what a picture is worth. Thank goodness Dad loved us enough to ignore our groans and snap them.

Kathryn Beisner

It's So Lover-ly

Adopt someone into
your
family this holiday season to shower with love by selecting from the following:

Open your home:
Look at your circle of acquaintances with new eyes. Do you know a college student who can't travel home this Christmas? A co-worker with no relatives? New neighbors in the house next door? A recently widowed church member? Think of them as extended family—and invite them to share your holiday dinner.

Adopt a grandmother:
Contact an area nursing center or retirement home and request the name of a lonely, aged resident. Make her your honorary grandmother. Visit, call and bring thoughtful gifts. Give freely of your time—and remember to continue this new relationship throughout the year.

Become an angel:
Take advantage of opportunities during December to reach out to others. Contribute to the mall mitten tree, to a single parent through your civic club or to a homeless teenager through a local shelter. Fill their requests, slip in a luxury item or two, and do it with the same generosity of spirit you'd show your own children.

Kindness

Mounting Evidence

“If you were arrested for kindness,” someone once asked, “would there be grounds to convict you?”

What an amazing concept, especially in a time when everyone is talking about it, but so few people seem to really be practicing it. Searching the Internet for the mere word brings a staggering 1,320,000 hits. Entire Web sites revolve around the topic. Countless essays expound complicated theories on the subject. Organizations like Compassionate Kids, Kindness Inc., Operation Kindness and the Human Kindness Foundation base their straightforward mission statements on it. Local, national and worldwide movements promote an entire revolution of it.

And with good reason.

These are hard times that try our souls. Hard times in the country, in the city, in the neighborhood, on the block. In all these places we find children wearing bruises and adults wearing hard faces. We find barren larders, drained pocketbooks and leaking hearts. We find wandering souls and aimless bodies. Withered minds and empty arms. The housebound and the homeless. Loneliness. Despair. Fear.

Suffering.

It may not be us personally, but the people are there.

Yet, underlying it all is mankind's eternal hope. Hope that things will be better, people will be fixed, diseases cured, the poor made rich . . .

So for now we rely on human kindness, the healing balm for all that ails us. For it is by being kind, we have discovered, that suffering is eased and joy is spread.

Practicing the art of kindness makes life better for everyone— the giver and the receiver. Whether spontaneous or premeditated, uncomplicated or complex, kindness-in-action strikes a positive influence.

It's a simple word, with an equally simple definition.

Kind: of a friendly, generous or warmhearted nature.

Kindness: the quality—or state—of being kind.

So how difficult is it to adopt this virtue? To make it a natural quality in ourselves? To actually
become
kind, warmhearted beings?

A college professor once said,“Kindness is inherent in all of us. It is our inner urge to imitate the divine, to give of ourselves.”

But even good intention doesn't necessarily beget kindness. Just ask Gladys.

A generous gift-giver, she thought of the holidays as an opportunity to share her modest wealth with friends and extended family. However, at ninety-three, she found shopping to be a monumental task. Instead, she decided to insert checks of equal value in everyone's Christmas cards.

In a rush to send them, Gladys kindly penned, “Buy your own present this year,” then she put the cards in the mail.

It wasn't until after the holidays that she discovered all the checks—buried under papers on her desk!

Like Gladys's mislaid checks, kindness is sometimes buried in the rush of life. And isn't that a shame? Especially when it's a character trait so easy to claim, so easy to incorporate, moment by moment and day by day.

Look around. Miss Manners preaches it: Be polite. Oprah— along with countless others—encourages it: Commit “random acts of kindness.” And the movie
Pay It Forward
spells it out: Kindness begets kindness.

It really
is
as simple as that.

Kindness is
niceness,
a common moral decency, or—plainly— doing what is right, what is polite. It doesn't falter in the face of religion, politics, gender or race. Kindness anticipates needs, creates value and substance, makes a difference—on a scale large or small, in random doses or in huge gulps. Kindness generates ripples without end. The more we offer, the more we will have to offer. Best of all, it's contagious—others pass it on.

Mother Teresa urged:

Spread love everywhere you go. First of all, in your own house
. . . let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier.
Be the living expression of God's kindness: kindness in your
face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile, kindness in your
warm greeting.

Her message is clear. And simple. Those who follow it can shout in one voice,“The evidence is in. We're guilty as charged! Convict us all on grounds of kindness!”

Drawn to the Warmth

Factoring in the windchill, I knew the temperature was below zero. The bitter cold cut through my Californian sensibilities, as well as my enthusiasm as a tourist, so I ducked through the nearest door for warmth . . . and found myself in Washington, D.C.'s Union Station.

I settled onto one of the public benches with a steaming cup of coffee—waiting for feeling to return to my fingers and toes—and relaxed to engage in some serious people-watching.

Several tables of diners spilled out into the great hall from the upscale American Restaurant, and heavenly aromas tempted me to consider an early dinner. I observed a man seated nearby and, from the longing in his eyes, realized that he, too, noticed the tantalizing food. His gaunt body, wind-chapped hands and tattered clothes nearly shouted, “Homeless, homeless!”

How long has it been since he's eaten?
I wondered.

Half expecting him to approach me for a handout, I almost welcomed such a plea. He never did. The longer I took in the scene, the crueler his plight seemed. My head and heart waged a silent war, the one telling me to mind my own business, the other urging a trip to the food court on his behalf.

While my internal debate raged on, a well-dressed young couple approached him. “Excuse me, sir,” the husband began. “My wife and I just finished eating, and our appetites weren't as big as we thought. We hate to waste good food. Can you help us out and put this to use?” He extended a large Styrofoam container.

“God bless you both. Merry Christmas,” came the grateful reply.

Pleased, yet dismayed by my own lack of action, I continued to watch. The man scrutinized his newfound bounty, rearranged the soup crackers, inspected the club sandwich and stirred the salad dressing—obviously prolonging this miracle meal. Then, with a slow deliberateness, he lifted the soup lid and, cupping his hands around the steaming warm bowl, inhaled. At last, he unwrapped the plastic spoon, filled it to overflowing, lifted it toward his mouth and—with a suddenness that stunned me— stopped short.

I turned my head to follow his narrow-eyed gaze.

Entering the hall and shuffling in our direction was a new arrival. Hatless and gloveless, the elderly man was clad in lightweight pants, a threadbare jacket and open shoes. His hands were raw, and his face had a bluish tint. I wasn't alone in gasping aloud at this sad sight, but my needy neighbor was the only one doing anything about it.

Setting aside his meal, he leaped up and guided the elderly man to an adjacent seat. He took his icy hands and rubbed them briskly in his own. With a final tenderness, he draped his worn jacket over the older man's shoulders.

“Pop, my name's Jack,” he said, “and one of God's angels brought me this meal. I just finished eating and hate to waste good food. Can you help me out?”

He placed the still-warm bowl of soup in the stranger's hands without waiting for an answer. But he got one.

“Sure, son, but only if you go halfway with me on that sandwich. It's too much for a man my age.”

It wasn't easy making my way to the food court with tears blurring my vision, but I soon returned with large containers of coffee and a big assortment of pastries. “Excuse me, gentlemen, but . . .”

I left Union Station that day feeling warmer than I had ever thought possible.

Marion Smith

School of “Hire” Learning

I wrinkled my nose and sniffed the air as I closed the classroom windows; still, I couldn't identify the faint odor. But it was Friday afternoon, my first week of teaching, and—although already in love with my hardworking students—I was exhausted and ready to leave the building.

For the most part, my twenty-four fifth-graders were the children of seasonal agricultural workers on Long Island. Their parents were employed at the local duck farm, many on welfare. They lived in converted duck shacks, with outside privies, cold-water hand pumps and potbellied, wood-burning stoves.

So odors weren't that unusual.

However, by Monday morning the foul smell overpowered the hot room. Like a dog scenting its prey, I sniffed until I found it: a rotting sandwich in Jimmy Miller's desk, the bread smeared with rancid butter and the meat green. I rewrapped the sandwich, put it back in his desk and threw open all the windows before my students filed in.

At noon, the children got their lunch bags and fled to the playground picnic table. I saw Jimmy unwrap his sandwich and pretend to eat. Making certain the kids didn't see, he wrapped it again, put it in his pocket and slipped it back into his desk when the class returned.

My stomach knotted in empathy over Jimmy's poverty . . . and his pride.

After a private discussion, another teacher and I “hired” Jimmy for classroom chores like cleaning the chalkboards. As payment, we treated Jimmy to lunch with us each day. We also encouraged him to study and provided him with after-school tutoring. Before long, Jimmy took pride in his special lunches and earned top grades in all his subjects. As word traveled through the faculty grapevine, Jimmy was “rehired” by each year's succeeding teacher.

After a time, however, I accepted another teaching position and moved away.

It was on a trip back eleven years later that my friend Chris asked if I remembered Jimmy. “He's attending college now and is home for Christmas break. When I mentioned that you were coming, he asked to see you. “

“Really? He was just a little shaver when I knew him.”

“He's grown some since then.” Chris tried to hide a smile. “Says he has a Christmas present for you.”

“A gift? For me?”

Jimmy drove up a bit later, and I walked out to meet him. At 6'6" and pushing 280 pounds, he certainly was no longer a little shaver.

“Happy holidays.” Jimmy stuck out an oversized paw. “I hear you got your doctorate. Congratulations! Do you mind if I call you Doc?”