Okay, all you guys who wouldn’t give me a specific charity to sponsor in your name, Food For The Poor is where contributions were made as my Christmas gifts to you. I’ve sponsored one orphan in the Caribbean for nine months in honor of each of the nine of you who responded to my Christmas post.

Should you need a last minute tax deduction, this would be my charity of choice. Nine contributions of just $60 will build a home in Jamaica for a family living in a shack with dirt floors, thatched roof, and no windows.

Merry Christmas.

Lola Teigland’s program to provide Christmas for Katrina families has begun to overwhelm her. Letters are pouring in faster than families are getting adopted. Never heard of it? That’s because Lola only began this program a month ago and it’s already turned into something huge.

This is one of those situations where all those scam busting tips I mentioned may not help that much. You’ll have to contact the family and go with your gut. There’s no way to know for sure if these people are also getting help from a dozen other places or are lying opportunists. Lola knows that she may get had by a family or two, but you can’t build anything worthwhile without earning a few cuts and bruises.

From my experience working with disaster recoveries, I can tell you that the passage of time is a fickle friend. For those of us who didn’t live through Katrina firsthand, time is life’s little tube of Neosporin that mends those open sores on our heart. The shock subsides, outrage tapers off, and suddenly one day, we can talk about the crisis without feeling daggers in our chests.

But Neosporin isn’t enough for a massive heart attack and the Katrina victims, themselves, need more than fifteen months to move on. These days, we hear less about the plights of people still trying to rebuild their lives and even assume that storm victims are probably pretty much on their feet by now.

Some are. Some aren’t.

Many Katrina evacuees still live right here in my small town. They never moved home because, after spending months in our shelter, they were either stuck here, had nothing to go home to, felt like our town was their refuge, or had suffered so much that they couldn’t bear to go back and witness the debris of their former lives. A few of these families are even on our angel tree.

If time has relegated Katrina to a page in your mental history book and if you can recall the horrors of Katrina without choking up, join the club. Life’s little Neosporin has served me well. While Katrina was my focus for many months as we sought homes, funding, and jobs for the hundreds of evacuees who landed here, I’m knee deep in other helping hand programs now and I simply don’t give Katrina the same attention I gave it last year. My own community has kids spending Christmas at Children’s Medical Center, families living without electricity, grandparents raising kids on nothing but Social Security and newly widowed parents coping with the death of the bread winning spouse.

So many needs. Not enough help to go around.

My proposal to you — Find a program you believe in. Offer your help. Then, do it again once a month for the rest of your life. Or, better yet, do what Clara Barton did, what William Booth did, and what Lola Teigland did. Use your own beliefs, your own skills and experience, and your own heart’s desire to respond to a need from the ground up. You may suffer a few cuts and bruises, but there’s always Neosporin.

Have I mentioned before how much I dislike Christmas? I always turn a blah’ish shade of blue this time of year.

Please don’t boo. It’s not polite.

Family squabbles, hectic schedules, silly looking sweaters, countless parties, shopping, and let’s not forget all that pressure to have a blinged out house and give rockin’ cool gifts at the office — not looking forward to it.

Don’t you dare call me Scrooge or Grinch!

You’re a writer. You can do better.

Besides, why don’t people like Chia pets? I mean, really. Why? That Scooby Doo one is awesome! He’d look great in that space I’m saving for my Pulitzer. I only need something temporary there anyway.

But I get candy. Lots of it. Jars and cans and boxes and bags of every twisted, gnarly lookin’ candy to ever leave a Dollar General store. Ever notice how stale candy smells like a hot glue gun that’s been plugged in too long?

I know. That’s not very gracious of me.

You see, I’m a church girl and if Christmas really was only about singing carols and doing good will toward men, I’d enjoy it more. But it’s not. It’s also about that intern with the twinkling tie, that secretary in the jingle bell socks and that office nerd with the terrible body odor who wears that stupid mistletoe hat.

Yeah, his name really is Dwight and if I had a Chia pet, I’d knock him upside the head with it. Take that! And, that! And that! You twig wearing, muttonhead! Ask Santa for some Right Guard!

Sorry.

Christmas makes me grumpy.

But every year, something else happens, too. Some unlikely somebody does some remarkable something that is so unselfish and surprising, it restores my faith in humanity. One year, it was a handful of $1000 cashier checks for me to distribute to families as I saw fit. Another year it was an eighteen wheeler that somebody backed up to Toys R Us and said, “go get what you need, here’s my credit card”. And, every year, every single child on our community angel tree gets adopted.

Where do these kind souls come from? I don’t know. But, they come.

So, as much as I loathe the pomp and vulgarity of the season, I’m also waiting — anxious and expectant like a kid who knows Santa will come — to find out what Christmas miracle I’ll witness this year.

Who will it be? What will he bring?

Doesn’t matter, as long as it isn’t candy.