'Tis the Season
by Cathy Burton

Anyone who has worked in “the trenches” for a while knows that the best way to get people involved is to have some immediate crisis at hand. It is much more difficult to keep people involved when we are just taking care of everyday life. It also seems that as neighborhoods, we are constantly on high alert, fighting an endless battle just to put out the fires. So it is important to share when something comes along that is truly an uplifting experience.

Each year, our Civic League coordinates a Christmas Drive to help families in our township, and it is truly a community event. Our local schools hold a food drive so that we can provide the families who receive assistance with several months worth of nonperishable food. Our local Chamber of Commerce and Lions Club help provide a ham and turkey to each family for their holiday meals. The high school student council collects hundreds of new toys for the kids. Local businesses and churches help collect gloves and hats. Residents and community organizations donate thousands of dollars every year to help provide for the families. Classrooms at schools add up their pennies, neighborhoods hold garage sales, businesses collect donations during special events, and construction crews go out at lunchtime and buy truckloads of peanut butter and diapers. It is truly amazing to see the level of generosity that comes from every corner of the township.

One of the most amazing parts of this whole effort is the food drive. Literally tens of thousands of cans and boxes of food are donated that must be moved from the schools and churches to a central location to be sorted and boxed in less than a week. We have an incredible number of volunteers who come to help with this - from scout and 4-H groups to senior citizens, from our Fire Department to those who just drop in unannounced. We work in a small area with inadequate table space and are literally climbing over each other to stack cans of green beans and tuna fish and figure out which category the boxed potatoes go in. It is hot and crowded and chaotic, and is a true challenge to the back muscles, but everyone has a great time, and amazingly the job often gets done ahead of time.

Then there are the people who make sure the kids in the family have clothes and toys for Christmas. Each family has a shopper assigned who gives up time from their own holiday preparations to shop for the items the kids need. This is not always as easy task, since we have to make our funds stretch as far as possible by looking for bargains and special sales. And it seems like we are always scrambling to provide for families we don’t find out about until the last minute - often, our volunteers end up shopping for more than one family just to make sure we get everyone taken care of. And they do it cheerfully for people they have never met. Trust me, there is nothing that can put you in the Christmas spirit like standing in the middle of Wal-Mart at 3:30 in the morning trying to figure out how to buy 26 coats when you only have $400 left to spend. (And yes, we did manage to do that.)

But this Christmas Drive does more than provide for people in need (which is a really big deal all by itself). It shows us that neighborhoods are about more than moving drug dealers out or waging the latest zoning battle. It shows us that we do not always have to be at odds with each other, or someone else, in order to come together. It reminds us that “in the good old days” when a neighbor was struggling, they didn’t have to turn to the government to take care of them, because their friends and families and churches and communities just did it until they were back on their feet. And at some point, maybe those people turned around and helped out someone else.

So as we look toward the new year, and we get involved in the next crisis coming down the block, remember that there is more to being a neighborhood than just putting out fires and that sometimes all it takes is one act of kindness to change someone’s life forever.

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