Appreciating the things we have

Christmas is a time where families gather round to have a family-meal together and cherish all the good things we have and appreciating them. But Christmas is also a time when supermarkets are offering up against each other with an overload of different products and people buying loads of food that they’ll never can finish. Lots of food is also being thrown away as a consequence of having bought too much.

There are still a lot of families that can’t afford the luxury of a Christmas dinner, like other families can. So I think it’s good to give something to the families that are less fortunate, to give them a nice Christmas too. For example, in The Netherlands lots of companies give their employees a “Christmas Box” which is filled with wine, food that has a long shelf time and other products. From experience I can tell, that a lot of those products will be put away in the cupboards and won’t be used till they reached expiration date and eventually will be thrown away. So this year we decided to give the “Christmas Box” along with some extra products we bought to the Salvation Army. So those people who can’t afford it, still have luxury products for Christmas time. 

I think we still aren’t aware of all the things we have in life that are so common for us, but are uncommon for so many other people. Like running water, heat, a roof over our head, 3 meals a day, medicines and luxury products to nourish yourself like make-up or perfume,  etc. I can continue on and on. I think, especially around the Holidays, we should think twice and consider if we can do anything for other people that can help enormously.

I decided to donate €10,- each month to Unicef starting in January 2014. They are fighting against child mortality and because of the donations, they can make sure that the children will get clean drinking water and will be vaccinated against child diseases. There are still 18.000 children dying every day because of child diseases and dirty drinking water. It is really important that people who are able to donate to organisations like Unicef actually do it to help the children survive. Why can we easily spend €10,- on make-up or other products you don’t really need, but when an organisation asks it to help other people, you have to think about it and rather say no?

What are you doing for other people in this month or maybe you have plans for 2014?

Xoxo Anne