Teaching your child about holiday giving as opposed to getting

The holidays are all about the spirit of giving, but if you're not leading your kids in the right direction, they're apt  to veer off into the spirit of  getting. The temptations are great--TV ads galore for the latest toys, catalogs arriving daily in the mail and chatter among their friends about what's on their wish list. Before you know it, all they can think about and talk about is what they want and what they'll be getting.

We've done a few  things in our family to get our kids back into the spirit of giving. My brother-in-law started a tradition in our family many years ago. Early on Thanksgiving morning, while I was busy in the kitchen preparing our  holiday turkey with all the trimmings,  he would scoop up the four little girl cousins and whisper in their ears, "Do you want to go on an adventure with me?" Then he would pile them in the station wagon and off they'd go. The "adventure" began with a trip to the local grocery store where he allowed each of them to pick out just the right turkey to feed a  hungry family as well as a few other items such a family might need for their Thanksgving dinner. Then they piled back in the station wagon and drove to a local shelter that had requested these food items. Each girl carried her grocery bag and turkey into the shelter. Seeing the long line of people waiting for these bags certainly made an impression.

Around Christmas each year, Samaritan House, a local agency serving the disadvantaged in my community, sends out the call to "adopt a family" for the holiday. Each family has a wish list, which generally includes food items for their holiday dinner, and a few gifts--clothes and toys--for the children. Knowing the ages and interests of the kids helps to put a face on the family and makes giving to them a very real experience for our children. They would come shopping with me to help pick out just the right toys and clothes, and they would get  engaged in imagining what  gifts these children might like. We would talk about the importance of giving to people who might have much greater needs than we had.

It's hard to avoid that wish list your child is bound to dream up for himself and in the spirit of giving, you'll undoubtedly want to fulfill some of their holiday dreams. But as part of our children's wish lists, we ask them to substitute a donation to a charity for one of their items.They get to pick the charity and tell us why it's important to give to it. Then we make a donation in their name as part of our family's holiday giving.