For many years, I worked as a Kindergarten teacher in the Boulder area. One of the schools I worked in was a farm school. We had goats, chickens, sheep, honey bees and grew bio dynamic food. The children were actively engaged in the feeding of the chickens, collecting eggs and milking of the goats. We even made homemade goat cheese each week and ate it on our home baked rye bread!
In the four weeks before Christmas, teachers in the school had a yearly tradition called Secret Santa, where names were exchanged and gifts were secretly left for that person during the few weeks leading up to Christmas. At the end of December, a larger gift would be purchased and the name of the Secret Santa would be revealed at a group holiday party.
One year, we all talked about alternatives to purchasing gifts for one another at our faculty meeting. Creative ideas were discussed in place of buying yet another obligatory gift at this already busy time of year. “What else can we do? How else can we use our money and energy?” we all asked around the table. While we explored our options, we started talking about our values as a school. Being a farm school, we valued local, organically grown food, connection to nature and self-sufficiency. We wanted to donate our money to a place that was aligned with our values and mission. We discovered “Heifer International” an American non-profit organization that helps support farmers around the world, not only providing them with money, but with the skills and animals to build skills of self-sufficiency.
We looked through their catalog and found that we could select the country and the cause and even the type of farming we wanted to support. In our farm school, we had goats, chickens and bees, so we chose to send out money to support goat farmers in Ethiopia and honey bee farms in the Ukraine. We pooled all our money that normally would have gone to buying little gifts (that we didn’t need anyway) and give it all to Heifer International. We still had our staff Christmas party, but we had more fun simply spending time together, sharing food, singing songs and telling stories. And we were all relieved to not have to spend time in stores! Instead, we had more free time and our collective funds went to a much higher cause.
All in all, it was a positive experience of finding new intentional ways to give of our money at the holiday time of year. Here’s to creating new traditions that are meaningful and contribute to positive change in the world.