JINGLE ALL THE WAY
This season of giving should include extending charity and aid to orphans, the homeless, challenged, the sick and the forgotten
Let’s make presents for the ones we love and appreciate, but let’s also keep a budget for those who have nothing to offer us in return.
THE season to be jolly is upon us again. Or, should we call it the season to be spoiled, to overstretch our budget and to accumulate more useless stuff? I believe it is reasonable to assume that most of us sharing these lines did not grow up in the abundance of Christmas hype we find ourselves surrounded with nowadays.
I won’t pretend that the preChristmas season in Kuala Lumpur’s shopping malls doesn’t delight me every year. Just like thousands of others, my family and I make an annual pilgrimage to the great malls and marvel at the decorations, the displays, the lights and the music.
These temples of consumerism do a wonderful job at outdoing themselves and each other every year. Nevertheless, I do pity the sales staff that must endure Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer blaring from the loudspeakers in an insane loop, day in and day out for weeks.
When I was a child, there were no shopping malls anywhere nearby. Instead, we had one very well appointed toy store. Every year, my brother and I would await for a special piece of mail in our family’s mailbox in early December. The said toy store used to send a special edition of their catalogue to every household in town. The A5-sized brochure was trimmed in red, green and gold, and it featured every toy, doll, train track and game we could imagine.
In my house we had the great tradition of sitting down on the weekend and cut out the little pictures of every Christmas gift we hoped to receive on the eve of Christmas.
Ideally, my brother and I would each end up with a beautiful wish list for Santa, aka our parents. Each year, we decorated our letter with drawings, little star stickers and thank you’s in the hope that our dedication and obvious gratitude would enhance our chances of having some of our wishes fulfilled.
As the great educator she was, my mum had always made it clear to us that fighting over the images or pages would immediately