| Our attitudes and practices surrounding holiday-season giving to the less advantaged in society have a distinct flavour of humbugs, and decidedly stale ones at that. It seems that we haven’t really read Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, even though it has probably shaped the way we think about Christmas like no other work. We can watch the numerous movies and debate the merits of Alastair Sim versus George C. Scott, we can hear it on radio or see it onstage, and yet one of the key messages has failed to sink in.
It’s easy to figure out that giving can make the donor feel good and, as in Scrooge’s case, be redemptive, bringing unexpected joys. It’s easy to figure out that a honking great turkey can make all the difference to a family that might have had to settle for wieners and beans. But what about the third element?
Less publicized than Scrooge’s Christmas-Day conversion is his Boxing Day follow-through, which really made the difference to the Cratchit family. He gave Bob Cratchit a pay raise and he became a second father to Tiny Tim. In other words, he made changes that enabled the Cratchit family to stand on their own feet.
Last year just before Christmas, I was eating dinner with a small group of residents at a local shelter when the door of their common room opened and a family with young children entered, offering paper platters of home-baked cookies. There was a stunned silence. No one knew what to say. The residents wanted to be polite, but it was obvious that they were already awash with home-baked goodies. Most said thank you and accepted a plate while the family stood there almost speechless.
In the conversation after they left two points were made: First, it is very embarrassing to feel like zoo animals when you are relaxing in what amounts to your home. And secondly, that there are much more constructive gifts than cookies.
Calgarians are extraordinarily generous and, if it weren’t for the annual outpouring of gifts, food, blankets, socks and so on, many people would be left in the cold literally and figuratively. However, many of us seem content to rest on our Christmas wreaths. We seem to forget there are reasons why people are in need and that we should do something about those reasons, if we are really serious about wanting to help.
For instance, welfare does not pay enough to cover rent, food and utilities, so you become so worn down in the day-to-day grind of trying to make ends meet and going without, that it becomes very difficult to find your way out of the poverty maze.
For instance, minimum wage in this province is the lowest in the country at $5.90 an hour. Not a whole lot of people are at minimum, but for those who are it’s the pits, and a province as wealthy as Alberta should be ashamed to be condoning slave labour. Others, who earn more per hour, may not get a full workday, so again they are strapped.
For instance, we expect Albertans to pay their own health-care premiums, making us one of three provinces to do this. The workplace pays them for many Albertans, but for others it means that health-care insurance is beyond their means. This is another embarrassment. Could it be that the red that should be flaming in our cheeks has slipped to our necks?
For instance, there is an acute shortage of affordable, safe housing. You leave an abusive relationship, only to find there is nowhere you can afford to live. Do you return so that the children will have a roof? But, if you do, what will it do to them when they see you being beaten like a carpet?
For instance, there is a shortage of detox beds in this city. Even if you are ripe for sobriety, there is absolutely no guarantee that you will find the help you need to come down safely.
You get the picture.
Most of these conditions are way beyond an individual’s power to change, but we shouldn’t let that deter us from speaking to our elected representatives at all levels of government and asking for real and substantial measures so that we don’t, as a matter of policy, marginalize people, relegating them to lives that none of us would want to lead.
Yet, as Scrooge found out, ’tis the season to give and most of us have a genuine desire to reach out. What can we offer that might make all the difference? Here are a few suggestions:
· Find an agency that assists people with housing and then donate cash that is earmarked to help pay a damage deposit, or this winter’s inevitably high utilities bills, or to help to pay the January rent. Any one of these three things could ensure that a family gets through the most difficult time of the year with food on the table so the children can go to school ready to learn.
· Give certificates for Safeway or Co-op, then recipients have the dignity of choosing their own groceries. The same goes for clothes and toys. Think how wonderful it would be for a teenager to buy jeans at a store of his or her choice, instead of selecting from a pile of hand-me-downs.
· Phone cards. If you don’t have a phone, 35 cents per call can mount up really fast, making it hard to keep in contact with social workers, look for a job or keep in touch with family. Books of bus tickets never come amiss when you are looking for a job or house hunting.
· If the timing isn’t important to you, January and February are really hard months on the street. Consider doing something nice for someone then, when they are least expecting it and probably most needing it.
Scrooge would get a kick out of that.
Susan Scott is writing All Our Sisters: Homeless Women in Canada (Broadview Press), due to be published in 2006, with the help of a grant from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. |
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