As the time flies by before the holidays hit, it can be hard to look beyond your own daily tasks, but taking the time to do small things for your community will make a big difference.
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The holidays are ticking closer. Every passing hour the pressure intensifies. How can we think about the welfare of the world when we’re barely keeping our families afloat for the season? Food and family and gifts and decorations… All this manufactured joy, whether we actually feel it or not.
Holidays can be really hard any year, but 2024 hits particularly hard. The waning days of December mean the opening days of January are just around the corner. And with that, comes a new administration promising to strip so many of us of rights starting on day 1. Yet, we plaster grins on our faces, for the kids, for the co-workers, for the society in which we live.
But the holiday season also provides a unique opportunity. For those looking for something they can do to make this world just a little brighter for someone facing unfathomable burdens, the holidays open routes not always available the rest of the year.
This week, many of the small things I did involved caring for my local community through organizations that already have the infrastructure to help those in need, particularly at this time of year. Your local organizations may be different. You might donate time instead of toys, or food instead of time. Whatever you do, while it may seem like a drop in a bucket, will make a world of difference to someone. And we never know what effect the ripples of that drop will have in our shared future.
Check out this week’s list below.
1) The Child Advocacy Center in my area sent out a list of holiday wants and needs for 45 local families, and I signed up to buy presents for three children in Family #16. Signing up took me about half an hour because I looked through the list to find one family for whom I could afford something for each child. Go online to check out your local child-focused nonprofits. I guarantee you’ll find an infrastructure already set up to help you help families in need during this sometimes overwhelming season.
2) Helping also means learning and educating ourselves. Right now, there are several deadly conflicts ongoing in the world, and here in America we are at the mercy of those who write the stories that make the news, and the framing that journalists give those stories. Yet only when we dig deeper to understand these conflicts can we even begin to help resolve them, or at least ameliorate the suffering they cause.
If you want to know more about what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank from a Palestinian perspective, Haymarket Books is giving away four e-books about that conflict right now. I downloaded them to my e-reader, which took less than five minutes. If you’d like to preview the materials, you can find them here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/blogs/495-free-ebooks-for-a-free-palestine
3) After signing up for the gift giving, I had to shop for the Barbies and the remote control car the local children had asked for. Dropping the toys off at the Child Advocacy Center, I was greeted by a woman volunteering there. Gifts of all shapes and sizes were laid out on the long table in front of her, each labeled with a number corresponding to the family it was going to. Seeing the physical enormity of the operation helped me to overcome the guilt I had felt about only being able to sign up to help one specific family. If everyone helps just one family, it adds up to a lot of families. And every child getting a wish fulfilled matters.
4) In addition to contributing gifts through the Child Advocacy Center, I organized a toy drive at my office. Everyone brought an unwrapped toy to our on-site office holiday party. Then I dropped the toys off at our local Junior League, which was hosting a community toy drive. Any new, unwrapped toy was welcomed, and the League will get those toys to children in our area. All I had to do was send a company-wide email about it and collect the toys in my own office. Working with my co-workers and the Junior League means 25 more toys are going to children in our town this year. It took me 10 minutes to write the email, an hour to buy my toy and 30 minutes to drop all the toys off.
5) I signed an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) petition asking President Joe Biden to shut down all US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers before he leaves office in January. It seems pie-in-the-sky, but the ACLU has a proven track record of speaking truth to power. This takes under a minute, and if you’d like to sign, you can find the petition here: https://action.aclu.org/send-message/shut-down-ice-detention-machine
6) I turned off Microsoft permissions for AI training. The AI option is automatically on for many Microsoft subscriptions, so you have to manually shut it off, if you don’t want it used by the corporation. Keep in mind, this is not about generative AI, but unless you turn it off, Microsoft does analyze your content. It’s worth turning off if you work with sensitive information or don’t want your stuff surfacing in anonymized web search results. To do this, go to file > options > trust center > trust center settings > privacy options > privacy settings > connected experiences. Turn that “off.” Hit save. Restart Word. This took about three minutes.
7) I bought three copies of the 2025 World Almanac and Book of Facts to give to incarcerated people through the Books Through Bars program. The Almanac is one of the most requested books, and right now, it is on sale at three for $30 (until the end of the month) through Freebird Books. (It’s normally $54.) Freebird will send the books to those who are incarcerated. This took just a couple of minutes. If you’d like more information, you can find it here: http://www.freebirdbooks.com/shop.html
So many of these things seem too small to make a difference, but they truly add up. Keep coming back to find little things you can do any time you are feeling hopeless. Every small thing you do helps. And that’s all we can do — help.
