Sunday, December 9, 2012

Greed Gets a Makeover

Link on the left with his friends Stewart and Harper

It's December. Christmas is upon us now and Link is in full force 3 year old greed mode. He's very excited by everything about the holiday this year since he finally understands it. But we had to take a step back and reanalyze what he actually understood. Yes, he gets Santa and the concept of that. We are not religious people. For our family this holiday is not about Jesus. It's not about Santa. It's about family and friends and it's about giving to others. This is not a post to invite everyone to slam my family and our beliefs or to spark controversy. But we do enjoy traditions and Santa is a part of that and so are gifts for each other. A week ago though I started to realize that Link was getting swept up in that and the "I want this for Christmas" attitude. Not cool. Something had to change.

Our "elf" thinks Link needs a greed-check.
I am one of those overachieving elf on the shelf people. This may annoy you. I don't care. I do it for our family. Today our elf showed up with an armful of cash and a note that read "Christmas is about giving to others. Take this money and go out and do something nice for someone else." Our first task was to walk Link through the house and go through his things to see if there was anything we could give away. A lot of the donations are for new toys only. Even so, Link picked out quite a few things to give away. Even if we were not donating to charity we told him he could give some things to his friends if he wanted. He got very excited. I'm sure if we hadn't been with him he might have actually given away all his toys to his friends. He was so excited about giving gifts to people. We were not expecting this but were pleasantly surprised. We now have a fairly large pile of toys and books that he will help us wrap to give to his friends. After this activity we knew we had to run a few errands anyway (buy dog food, get some tape, etc). We grabbed the cash and headed out.

Harper and Link with Santa. 
Our first stop was Petsmart to get food for Bowser. At the checkout lane we purchased a stuffed dog where some of the proceeds go towards homeless pets. Since we obviously didn't need the toy we put it in a bag in our van to donate. Next stop was Starbucks for a drink D has been craving and a little hot chocolate for Link. Included in our purchase was a $5 gift card that we had Link give to the next person in line. It was really cool to see. She was very excited to get it and while we were sitting down drinking our drinks she actually came up to our table after she got her drink with her info and facebook link. She's a photographer and she offered to do a free session for us. It was really sweet of her. We were obviously not doing this for any kind of return or anything. Just wanted to brighten someone's day. What goes around comes around I suppose. After that we ran to Target for some misc. household items. After picking up the things on our list we took Link to the toy section and he picked out some toys that we could take to be donated to Toys for Tots. When we were done at Target we hit one of the TFT drop off locations. Link added the stuffed dog from Petsmart to the bag of Target toys and carried them in himself and put them all the box. He was really excited about the whole thing. It made my heart smile. So even though he can be kind of rotten and sometimes I'm convinced his hearing is bad since I have to repeat myself 8 million times a day, I know he's an amazing and kind-hearted little boy and I'm lucky to be his mommy.

A Time I Had