Kindness can keep helpless feeling at bay
Among many welcome additions to my life since moving to Canada about 15 years ago is the expansion to my concept of “holiday season.”
I went from partaking in a mishmash of Indian festivals of various religions to a mishmash of Indian and Canadian festivals of various religions. That expansion has meant bonding with new family members, new friends and experimenting with new foods.
By a stroke of great fortune, my family has never celebrated either Diwali or Christmas by ourselves — until this year rolled around. All the lights of Diwali this past weekend couldn’t quite banish the shadow of loneliness brought about by pandemic-style celebrations. We made paper lanterns, lit diyas, did the dawn oil massages among ourselves, ate sweets and … shared photos on WhatsApp.
It’s the same shadow that has hung over Easter, both the Eids (Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha), Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Thanksgiving and other holidays this year.
The way things are going — we now have more than 300,000 COVID-19 cases across the country, a third of them in Ontario — I don’t expect Christmas, Hanukkah and any winter solstice observances to be different.
We’re perched atop a stinger of a viral wave. Canadian health officials predict that if contact rates remain exactly as they are today, if everything remains open and people continue to mingle for work and pleasure as they now do, Canada will hurtle towards a
surge of more than 20,000 cases per day by the end of December.
In the light of these dire forecasts, shutting down seems like a sensible option for our family. Our plan is to keep our celebrations pretty much the same as usual minus the people — tree, cookies, hot cocoa, board games, big meals, presents. Hopefully it will create another flash of memory for our kids. Wait, what?
If we do only that and our kids look back on December during the pandemic, they’re going to be aghast. We did what while people were losing their incomes, losing their health, losing their lives?
What about giving? Surely, if ever there was a year where the need was grim, this is it.
The seasonal food bank drives have acquired a new urgency. The Daily Bread Food Bank
says food bank visits grew by 51 per cent in August compared to 2019.
And then, thankfully, there is the time-tested Toronto Star Santa Claus Fund, established in 1906 by Toronto Star founder Joseph E. Atkinson, whose own hard-scrabble background deeply influenced the vision and principles that continue to guide our journalism.
He used the paper to tell readers the stories of children in need, like he once was, and asked readers to contribute money to buy Christmas gifts. Those initial gifts consisted of fruit, candy, socks and mitts and were distributed through his local Toronto church, Little Trinity.
The gift boxes of today are filled with a hoodie, socks, mittens, a hat, a book, a toy, cookies and a dental hygiene kit.
That’s also where my kids will
come in. They will be among the many, many elves delivering gift boxes this year, with gloves and masks on, sanitizer bottles full.
The way it works is names of children receiving gifts — about 45,000 of them — are submitted to the Santa Claus Fund by Ontario Works and more than 100 social service agencies in Toronto, Brampton, Mississauga, Ajax and Pickering. As in 1906, gift boxes are then delivered to the homes of the children by volunteers including church groups, services groups and individuals.
Because the items in the gift boxes are purchased directly from manufacturers at significantly lower prices, only cash donations are accepted.
I don’t subscribe to a largescale philanthropic models of social development. It’s the job of governments to enact policies to ensure people don’t fall through the cracks and not depend on the largesse of individual rich people. Tax the wealthiest, I say. But I do believe in individual acts of goodness. I don’t view them as offering a helping hand for the needy as much as I value them for the larger function they serve: to make for a kinder, less self-absorbed society.
In uncertain times such as these, they offer us an opportunity to quell that inevitable sense of helplessness over conditions outside our sway, to regain a modicum of control with the idea that we can still direct aspects of our own character and actions to make change, however big or small.
I hope those who can give, consider giving. In any case, stay safe, everyone.