No one has ever been made poor by giving.
Anne Frank
Anna's Hummingbird on feeder (Wiki Commons)
Feeding the Birds
I realize that when people think about Christmas, hummingbirds are probably not the first thing that comes to mind. At Christmas time, however, I love to feed the birds. Unfortunately, in Vancouver, most rental units and stratas do not allow bird feeders. The reason given is because they will attract rats and there is some truth in that because most birds eat seeds and rats enjoy any seeds that fall to the ground. However, Vancouver is a port city and rats are always around; they're just more visible when they are scrounging for fallen seeds. But enough about rats. My end-run around the no bird feeder rule is to feed hummingbirds. There is one species of hummingbird that lives in Vancouver year-round - Anna's Hummingbird (Calypte anna). We have a window feeder and Anna's hummingbirds come regularly from dawn to dusk. I love watching them. Our cat, Goldie, also loves watching them because she would like to eat them. "Krrgh," and other frightening sounds, come out of her throat and she gnashes her teeth and every fibre of her being shouts, "I want to eat you!" Thankfully for the hummingbirds, she is an inside cat. And so we are all happy: the hummingbirds, my family, and our cat.
Feeding the Shuttle Drivers
The C 20 Community Shuttle (Translink) stops right across the street from my house. I don't ride it every day, but several times a week I take it over to go shopping or to choir practice or to see my therapist. My son rides the shuttle five days a week to school. And even my husband takes it to work once in a while. The shuttle is a convenience that makes our lives more liveable.
The shuttle drivers are friendly and helpful. I try to be friendly back and because I'm not a student, they are more likely to remember me than the hundreds of young students who are their usual customers. And so, I decided to bake Christmas cookies (which of course look just like these in the picture. Well, to be honest, we only had red food colouring and red and green sprinkles, so they look nothing like these.) and hand them out to the shuttle drivers. So far, I've handed out three small bags of cookies. At first, the shuttle drivers look puzzled or even alarmed when I start to hand them a bag. Then when they realize it's cookies, they smile and thank me. I plan to hand out about three bags a day every day from the 24th through the 27th. (27th because otherwise I'll probably miss many of the regular drivers.)
Women winnowing rice, India (Michael J. Foley photo, flickr)
Feeding the World
My son and I have a bit of a family tradition about playing freerice at Christmas-time. What is freerice? It's a website where you can answer questions and earn grains of rice to feed hungry people. This year my son and I added a new twist which kept us laughing. We decided that we could each choose our own categories and stay in a category until we "earned" 1,000 grains of rice; then each of us would "assign" a category to each other. My son assigned me Chemistry and Flags of the World, definitely not categories I enjoy. I gave him English Literature and Art History. He decided to "just answer randomly" after a few minutes of frustration. Meanwhile, I did fair with Chemistry and dismally with flags, which all look alike to me. Freerice is a website sponsored by the World Food Programme. Between us, we earned 12,000 grains of rice yesterday and I signed us up for a pledge to play 20 minutes of freerice a day during the holiday season. I hope I'm not returned to the nightmare world of look-alike flags. We'll see.
Feeding my Heart
In the evening, my husband and I strolled down the street to Unit #1 in our townhouse and enjoyed a delightful concert put on by four of the children in our building. The children were three girls and one boy, ages 8 to 12. Between them they played piano, flute, and violin. The parents of the two pianists had dropped off handmade flyers at each unit in our building and there was a good turn-out for the concert. The concert lasted about an hour and it definitely warmed my heart. The first part of the concert was demanding: long piano pieces by Shostakovich, Lizt, and Chopin. The Christmas carols and the ubiquitous, although delightful, Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies were crowd pleasers. I was especially taken with the ensemble's rendition of Angels We Have Heard on High. The performance below is nothing like the one I heard last night, but I like it because without a video of the "real thing," it is a lovely piece in its own right. After the concert, we mingled with our neighbours and ate Christmas cookies and other snacks and felt like part of a larger family for a while. It was a lovely end to a restful day mostly spent at home. (The beautiful picture of the purple heart was taken by D. Sharon Pruitt and can be found on flickr.)
So what does all of this have to do with grieving or PTSD? Oddly, quite a bit. Research has shown that making connections, whenever you can, is the final step on the healing path. Research also shows that kindness is good for all of us, whether we are processing grief and trauma or simply trying to build a more meaningful life. Not surprisingly, at least for me, authors Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor report in their book, On Kindness, that kindness makes people happier than focusing on themselves.
What small (or large) kindnesses do you find time for during this busy season?
