The start of a new and better Christmas tradition

So this year for the first time, my extended family won't hold the traditional grab bag gift exchange on Christmas Eve. In its place, we'll donate a monetary gift to a charity in the amount of what we would have spent on the grab bag gift (or more if so inclined). The charity is to be picked by the family hosting the Christmas Eve bash that year....and you guessed it, this year I and the hubby are hosting.

For many reasons I am glad this tradition has changed, and I am excited to see how our guests receive the idea and the charity to which we've opted to send the money.

Bill and I toyed around with a lot of potential charities. I love animals and am a supporter of the Humane Society. Bill has sponsored a needy child from Zambia for more than a decade and saw a need there. We also thought about local charities like the Capuchin Soup Kitchen and health-related organizations like the American Cancer Society. But in the end, we decided to pick a charity that has had a very recent impact on the family -- the Ronald McDonald House at the University of Chicago.

This chapter of the Ronald McDonald House provided a place of rest and a source of support to Bill's brother and sister-in-law this past summer. The house is just a short walk away from the University of Chicago Hospital where their daughter, Trinity Ava, was in the neonatal ICU for 13 days before she left this world. The Ronald McDonald House provided a place for Don and Lai-Lynn to stay so they didn't have to drive the hour back to their home in Indiana each night. Following Trinity's death, the chapter provided follow-up support to them as well.

After thinking it over, we couldn't think of any better place to send the money raised as part of this new Christmas Eve tradition. I credit my mom with thinking of this new way to ring in Christmas Day. It's a great idea and one that will have an impact well beyond December 24th.

To the few readers of this blog out there, please share any of your own Christmas traditions and reflections--maybe a memorable moment from a Christmas past.

Merry Christmas,
Jacquie

An Irish Wake? A grand idea.

I learned a new term yesterday...Irish wake. Have I been living under a rock, or are others new to this concept (which by the way is a fabulous idea) as well?

I don't mean to sound morose...on the contrary, I think this idea of celebrating someone's life in a more festive atmosphere sounds a lot more comforting than munching on finger sandwiches in a cold gathering space.

I attended a funeral yesterday of a friend's mom. The priest who eulogized her mentioned that she had made a decision upon her diagnosis of cancer 14 years earlier to live before she died rather than die before she had lived. She made that decision the day of her diagnosis and stuck to it despite recurrences of cancer throughout the years.

Now, this may be something frequently stated at funerals--I fortunately haven't been to enough to know--but it stuck with me. "Live before I die versus die before I have lived." Have I lived? Really lived? I like to think so, but as I mentioned in my last post, I frequently get bogged down in the details of daily living so much so that I forget to step back and really soak in the most important things in life (like my family).

In an appropriate gesture to her desire for fun surrounded by her friends and family, my friend's mom's funeral was followed by an Irish Wake. I think there' s a real message there...even in her death, she wanted people to live a little. And I see absolutely nothing wrong with that.

LeChaim,
Jacquie

Would you really let your kid draw on the wall?

Have you seen Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch's "Last Lecture?" It's a YouTube hit, and an appearance on "Oprah" and a feature article in The Wall Street Journal have served to spread his story even further. Professor Pausch has pancreatic cancer and a matter of months--or weeks to live. He imparts his life lessons on his audience, but more importantly his two young sons and baby daughter for whom the lecture was really intended.

The Oprah version is best, but if you can't access it there, see below.



Every time I watch this, I'm moved. Here's someone whose contributions to the human race we should be celebrating (and be reading about in the news versus those starlets whose life stories about which we know way too much).

I've been thinking about this lately as I've seen different speakers in different venues for work or social reasons. They all tell great stories, and I usually leave inspired. But I've noticed that those stories and the lessons contained within them often fade as quickly as they came when I'm back in the grind of day-to-day living.

So I ask myself after watching Professor Pausch's moving lecture another time, would I really let my four-year-old draw on the walls? I don't have kids yet, so I guess I'll find out some day down the road...hopefully at that point I'll remember this man's anecdote about his own childhood imagination played out on his bedroom walls and be encouraged to let junior do the same.

Comments welcome!

Cheers,
Jacquie