It Can Be Christmas Season Now, On One Condition

I tend to try to resist the annual forward creep of Christmas season as much as possible. It's supposed to be the most special day of the year. Granted. I get that. But... it's one day, two if you roll Christmas Eve in there as well. Not 90 of them. Unless you are a total Christmas-every-day devotee to the atmosphere, there eventually gets to be a point where you just get sick of it. You don't want to have people hitting the wall and getting sick of Christmas so that by the time Christmas actually gets here, people just want it to be over with. That defeats the purpose. (I personally have long held to the principle that Christmas season starts when Santa's float appears in the Macy's Parade, and not one second sooner.)

If nothing else... there are other holidays too, you know. We've almost succeeded in stampeding Thanksgiving into near-irrelevance because we just need that much more Christmas, and apparently now we want to start trampling Halloween too.

But.

If we absolutely must... MUST... have Christmas season now, let's at least make ourselves useful while we do it. If we can do that, I'll meet you halfway.

There's this woman in West Chester, Ohio, roughly midway between Cincinnati and Dayton, named Reola Hunt. She's 84 years old. She runs a charity called the Jamaica Children's Fund. Every year, she- and some other people that are a tad younger than 84, of course- they take a whole bunch of toys and fly down to Jamaica to distribute them to kids who otherwise wouldn't be getting anything for Christmas, visiting schools with dirt floors and communities where people showing visible signs of having money or needed supplies get pounced upon by groups with that kind of single-minded intensity that only severe desperation can invoke. This is going to be their 12th year doing this.

There isn't a direct donation page on their website, but if you're in Christmas Mode right now and are inclined to lend a hand, you can contact them here and work something out with them. If you're in the Cincinnati or Dayton areas, you could probably drop by personally.