Random acts of baking
Alison Mau: ‘Good Bitches’ show kindness at Christmas
For a writer, the topic of Christmas is a minefield pocked with incendiary cliches stretching from late November to December 25th. If you’ve read ‘‘tis the season’’ once in recent weeks, you’ve read it a thousand times – at least this column is being published on the eve of Christmas Eve, which means I can’t hit you with ‘‘Twas The Night Before ...’’ (a phrase one blog writer suggested should be automatically rejected by Microsoft Word). Don’t even try me with ‘‘naughty’’ and ‘‘nice’’.
Isn’t the word that best describes the next few days actually ‘‘overwhelming’’? It’s very versatile – I have a 20-year-old daughter, for example, who is still overwhelmed with excitement at this time of year.
I might have given up on making any effort at Christmas by now if it wasn’t for the way she bubbles with delight from the end of October onwards. It can also describe the enormous output of unpaid labour that goes into making Christmas happen for wha¯ nau; the love that fills the room when family get together for a rowdy lunch; and the loneliness felt by those who don’t or can’t celebrate with people they love.
But right in the dying days of a trying year, one of the Christmas cliches has had a bit of makeover and emerged as the star of 2018. A close cousin of ‘‘goodwill’’ – you know, the thing we’re all supposed to feel towards each other as we search the supermarket aisles for the last jar of cranberry jelly – has become the Word of the Year.
That word is ‘‘kindness’’, and a few days ago it cantered to a win in the annual public vote on news blog Public Address. Its competition included such exemplars of the 2018 zeitgeist as ‘‘e-scooter’’.
Kindness even beat my personal favourite – #metoonz – into second place, which was a very tough ask indeed.
Very appropriately, the word was nominated by a Kiwi who has let kindness almost completely take over her life. Wellingtonian Nicole Murray is the ‘‘Head Bitch’’ at Good Bitches Baking, a charity that was never supposed to be a proper charity, she told me this week. It started four years back when she and her mate Marie Fitzpatrick were enjoying a few wines.
‘‘We were really hammered actually and we’re having a conversation about how the world is going to s---. And we were talking about what happens when a small act of kindness gives you a little bit of hope that the next day will be better.
‘‘We got a group of friends together and decided we would start baking for Refuge and kids in hospital. But when we put it on Facebook, it exploded.’’
Long story short, there are now 2000 GBB active volunteers over 18 chapters from north of Auckland to Invercargill, delivering baking to hospitals, hospices and Alzheimer’s support groups. They also run Prison Bake, a programme at Rimutaka Prison where inmates learn to bake and feel the buzz of giving back to the community.
The GBB credo is very simple, Murray says. ‘‘A lot of people have been told all their lives that they’re not worth much. So if someone gives them a treat, they feel they’re worth something. Baking is practical, achievable and it’s something you can do with your hands so it’s personal as well.’’
When I asked my wider circle (aka the people I follow on social media) for their favourite acts of kindness of 2018, food was a bit of a theme. There were multiple instances of young mums having their groceries paid for by kind strangers, a daylong chain of pay-it-forward coffee purchases sparked by one early bird who paid for the coffee of the person next in line; lots of surprise meals for the elderly or the sick.
With characteristic restraint, journalist Mihingarangi Forbes had two words for me: ‘‘Food Pantry.’’ This is exactly as it sounds – publicly accessible cupboards of free food available to anyone, which are popping up in communities all over the country. A small way that people with enough food can help those who don’t have enough.
All day long, the Twitter thread morphed into a meandering discussion of the best we can be.
Some examples were startling and hilarious, like comedian Urzila Carlson’s description of the mum-led revolt against bullying at her daughter’s school.
There were some which stood out for their breathtaking generosity. The clip of Wellington beatboxer Te Ariki Toki, aka King Homeboy, giving away his $10,000 winnings to KidsCan live on the AM Show in early December is well worth a watch. It made me grin like an idiot all the way through.
Most of them, however, were small, everyday impulses you might not even think twice about. The guy in Wellington who chats to the city’s homeless and shakes their hands every day. The good mate who has taken his friend’s widow to the supermarket each Friday since her husband died. The constant acts of love by The Aunties charity. The network of mums who knit booties and hats for Plunket. The homeless Ma¯ ori lad who pushed an eminent academic all the way uphill to her hotel after her wheelchair broke down in Auckland’s CBD.
Heartwarming things that take just a moment, an hour or two, or a life’s work.
Kindness wasn’t such a focus elsewhere – the Oxford Dictionary’s official Word of the Year, for example, was ‘‘toxic’’. But perhaps that’s how we stand out here in New Zealand. We have a Government which has made kindness a priority, a leader who made a feature of it in her first address to the United Nations as a way to hit back against the nationalistic impulses of other nations.
‘‘I like to think it’s one of the ways we distinguish ourselves from the rest of the world’’, Nicole Murray says.
‘‘There are a lot of problems in the world, and here, that stem from hate. And our very best chance of moving on from that is kindness. I just imagine what a different world we’d be in if our first instinct was to be kind.’’
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone, and be kind, yes?
I will if you will.