24 Days of Giving

Every year, our big extended family on Trent's side likes to do a service project.   The past few years, we've purchased fleece and tied blankets for the Linus Project.  When all of us work together, we get quite a pile of blankets!  It's great to be part of something helpful like that.

This year, instead of doing an all-together service project, each family was asked to do their own projects.  We hunted for a while, wanting at first to do something epic.  But epic projects require epic amounts of money...  Then we wanted to do something for folks in South Africa or Madagascar.  For some reason, we have an affinity for those two places!  But we don't have enough knowledge or time to find something there.  And I'd really love to do something where the kids can be directly involved and see what good things happen when we serve.

So we finally settled on a smaller project that requires a bit of service every day.  Instead of one big project, we will be doing lots of little ones.  This way, we can help others around us and get that giving spirit all month long.

So here is the plan.  We went to multiplygoodness.com to print off their free pdf file of the day cards.  They print off four to a page so it's easy to cut them apart.  There are 24 cards - one for each day until Christmas.  Each card has an idea for a bit of service to do: leave a treat for the mail person, give change to the bell ringer, send a cheerful text, put a nice note on someone's car, give chocolate...  

None of them are hard, but all the little acts of goodness will add up.  Some require money (pass out candy canes), some need some advance planning (leave goodies on someone's porch), and some you can just do whenever  (encourage a young person).

I made open envelopes out of a half sheet of paper, then decorated them and numbered them all to 24.  I tucked a card in each envelope and paper-clipped them to tibbons I had strung up between nails.  No sheetrock was harmed during this project - the holes were already there.  Honest!

We'll open a new envelope each night - or maybe the first thing in the morning if (when) we forget (just keeping it real).  I hope we can remember and that the kids will get the feeling of giving through this Christmas season.