Today I proved the premise of this blog— it all starts with one.
I am a “lurker” on Reddit.com. I read many of the postings, but don’t often respond. The site is an aggregation of all that can be found on the internet: rants, pictures, links, news posts, random comments. However, I’d occasionally see instances where one poster offered up an item or service to another poster who might be in need.
While making Christmas cookies this evening, after a nice dinner in my lovely home, I decided to put up a post offering a $30 or less gift from Amazon to be shipped to a needy recipient’s house by Christmas Eve. The Amazon connection was really coincidental— I simply happen to be a member of Amazon Prime, and I knew that Amazon could be relied on to deliver a gift on time.
The idea actually came from a long-standing tradition in our family. A local facility that provides housing and support to families who are displaced by homelessness, abuse, etc has an “adopt a family” program at the holidays. The family provides wish lists, and the adoptive family purchases the gifts and returns them to the facility. We have done this as a family for about 10 years now, and I have gotten used to granting wishes off a list instead of buying toys to be donated to a general pool. So I decided to see how well this would go over on the internet.
So I posted up my post, and before I even had a response asking for my gift, I had two other posters offering to match as well.
And then the post EXPLODED.
By 11:28pm, as of this writing, more than 180 other posters had matched or exceeded my offer. The outpouring of generosity for total strangers was both astonishing and heartwarming. I have received hundreds of messages in the past four hours.
All it took was one post, and one Easy Bake Oven, to make a Christmas wish come true for more than 180 other families.
Some will argue that there’s no checks on the internet, and we could be sending gifts and toys to people who don’t need them, when we could be donating them to an organization like Toys for Tots instead. I choose to believe in the goodness of the human nature, and I liked the idea of fulfilling a real wish. It was especially fulfilling since I never got an Easy Bake Oven myself, despite wanting one for many years as a child. I think programs like Toys for Tots are great— but I also think it may be easier for some families who have fallen on hard times to accept help from the internet, instead of from an organization like Toys for Tots.
I know that most people who are on Reddit are not truly impoverished. After all, they have internet. They are generally a pretty educated set. But I also know that there are a lot of participants there who have lost a lot of their lives in the recession, due to unemployment, military service, or any number of causes that those of us who don’t face them can’t understand.
You can do this in your community next year— call up a local shelter, assistance facility, orphanage, and inquire about “Adopting” a child, a family, or a soldier for Christmas. Or you can start your own post and change Christmas for almost 200 families, just for your $19.99 item from Amazon.
We’re all in this together, and the holidays are a time of giving. The community of Reddit proved that today.
