Blessed so that we can bless others.

For the past several years our Christmas gifts to our parents have been the gift of a donation to others in need. This year we had some fun giving them clue gifts from their grandchildren and now we will reveal what the “real” gifts are. This year those gifts are real and tangible for my children to see and participate in assembling. We had two gift catalogs that we selected the gifts from. One was for Heifer International and the other was the Mennonite Central Comittee Gift Catalog We have given through Heifer for many years but this was our first year giving through MCC. One thing that we really liked about that catalog was the ability to actually give something physical, not just money. More about that in a bit.

We started out our gift giving with a trip toPlowsharing Crafts. This is a local non-profit store that sells fair trade goods from over 40 countries. They even have items built right here in St. Louis in one of the homeless encampments down by the river! Giving a gift from Plowsharing Crafts feels good because you know that it is supporting people all over the world with fair wages for their honest work. Much better supporting slave conditions in factories in third world countries that enrich the wealthy factory owners and further oppresses the workers who may be helpless to make other choices for employment and survival, just to save a bit of money on the goods purchased. Isn’t it better to have a few things that benefit a few than many things that oppress many? After all if no one buys their goods in protest to how the workers are treated the slave wage factories will go out of business. Lets just call this our Butterfly Effect

As our parents now know we purchased soap on a rope, another bar of soap, an alpaca, a jazz cd, and two small animals with heads that bob up and down. It is our hope that when they see or use these items they will spend a moment praying for the people who will benefit from the gifts they represent.

I’ll start with the soap on a rope (I really regret not getting a photo of each of these items before they were shipped off.). This was purchased to represent the Hygene kit that we assembled that the Mennonite Central Comittee will keep in a warehouse to ship off to those in need. I just learned today that they are in need of 10,000 more of these right away since their supplies were recently depleted by a disaster in Africa. This will be packed into a simple drawstring bag and is emergency aid for one person. So please pray for the people suffering disasters around the world when you use your soap dad.

Our next gift was a miniature alpaca like this one.

She loves Jazz music and also quilt making and so I thought that this gift is to fund a project in Columbia that uses story quilts to help the women of that area heal from the trauma of many years of armed conflict.

Our last gift was a snail like this one and a very similar bunny.

Here is some the necessary cuteness of my children packing the box of for the disaster relief kit.

There is still time in 2011 to make a donation to any of these charities or any others as well. MCC has said that they are in need right now of 10,000 hygiene kits and 10,000 school kits because shipments to East Africa for drought relief has depleted their supplies greatly. Go here to see details on how you could put one of those together with your family. They have listed on the website where you can drop them off or if you are local to me I would be glad to deliver any kits along with mine. Plowsharing Crafts also accepts these kits for donation at either store and will get them where they need to go for you. Both of these kits are delivered to the recipients in a cloth bag that you could make to go along with the kit if you want to be even more hands on with your gift.