When I taught in schools affected by poverty, I became very sensitive to the situation, especially around the holidays. I would frequently provide Christmas gifts for students or families mostly because I could not enjoy my holiday knowing some of my students would have nothing. I was about halfway through my career when I had an epiphany about providing for students in poverty; they often are the recipients of gifts from charitable strangers, but they were very rarely given the opportunity to know the joy in giving. Children in poverty want to be able to give a gift just as much as you. They want to choose the gift, they want to wrap it and they want to present it to someone they love. I noticed when I gave a child the opportunity to choose a gift for a mother, sibling or grandmother, they experienced greater joy than when they got a book or a game for themselves. Because they didn’t have any  money to purchase gifts, they were allowed to write down acts of kindness they had performed during a week and make the purchases with their own acts of service. Nobody pitied them. Nobody gave them anything. They earned it and they were extraordinarily happy to learn that their acts of kindness had real value that could be traded for gifts. The gifts were items people gave me or trinkets I got from the Dollar Tree. Once I asked parents to send in things they had received that they wanted to re-gift and I was the first one surprised by the amount of candles, bubble bath, body lotion, scarves, socks, oven mitts I received for free.  The value did not really matter. It was the experience of earning and giving that brought the students affected by poverty the most joy. They wrapped their gifts, tagged them and happily took them home. 

How often is it that we can purchase something with acts of kindness? For the students in my class, they became acutely aware of the value of being kind, holding a door for someone, playing with a lonely friend, including someone who has been excluded. That list they are making has real value and it makes them aware of opportunities to do the right thing. Of COURSE they wanted a long list so they could spend more. Those who had really long lists drove up the prices of the products. At the end of the activity, I realized there was more joy in facilitating an opportunity for them to be able to give to someone they loved, than in receiving a toy off their own wish list. 

I always had gifts left over so I could easily repeat this at Mother’s Day or for someone’s birthday.