What to Do Instead

As the holiday season rapidly approaches, are you concerned about what to buy friends and loved ones?  Do you look in their closets and drawers and wonder how they could ever shove in one more garment?  Do you marvel at all their electronics and other gadgets and wonder what on earth you could buy to top what they already have?  Does the thought of shopping cause immense stress?  


Alternatively, do family and friends ask what they can get you and you are hard pressed to give an answer as there really is nothing that you really need or want.  In either case, think about outside the box about gifts that don't produce more *stuff* in our already crowded world but instead are beneficial to people and to the earth.

One gift that I highly recommend is student sponsorship at an amazing orphanage in Haiti.  For only $20 a month, you can provide education and meals to village children who would otherwise go without schooling and food.  Pastor Daniel and his wife Clynie, along with a wonderful American missionary named Emily, run a school out of their orphanage.  $20 a month provides books, supplies, a uniform, and a meal for each student, each day during the school year.  Does your loved one really need that reindeer sweater that might get worn once a year?  Or the fringed leather jacket that is already so last season it will be at Goodwill before Valentine's Day?  Or yet another game system to sit next to the other 3?  Instead, give the gift of life and education and provide your loved one with a photograph of a child who truly has nothing.  For more information and to see the faces of some of the children needing sponsors, go to Nord Est Haiti Lutheran Mission.