This year as you’re doing your holiday shopping, you’ll no doubt hear the ubiquitous Christmas tune, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year.”
But for many of us, it doesn’t always seem so wonderful …
After all, what is so wonderful about driving around hunting for that ever-elusive parking spot, just to exhaust ourselves with hours of endless shopping only so we can buy presents for relatives who already have everything they could ever want or need?
It’s not that we don’t enjoy Christmas – we do. We especially appreciate the true meaning of Christmas and the time spent with family and friends. But with all the pressure of what we’re supposed to buy and for whom and by when, we find ourselves getting a little distracted from this meaning.
Every year, we are stretched beyond our limits in finding the time, money, and energy to buy something for everyone on our list just for the sake of getting them something – anything! Does such a gift really say “I love you?” Will our loved ones really suffer if they don’t have the latest gadget or gimmick?
Are you tired of this aggravating cycle? Wish your Christmas gifts had more lasting value? We do too.
That’s why this year we’ve decided to do things differently. We’re giving to an organization that is having a lasting impact.
We’re taking the hundreds of dollars we would have ordinarily spent on people we genuinely love, but who honestly don’t really need any more “stuff,” and instead, we’re donating it to a very special group of kids in Uganda.
In 2009, Ellen spent two weeks in Uganda volunteering with the Kampala Children’s Center, or KCC, just outside the capital city of Kampala. The Center is home to just over 100 children. The children of KCC left her both challenged and changed.
The children living at Kampala Children’s Center come from tragic backgrounds of abuse and abandonment; of war and victimization; of death and disease.
But yet it was here, in this tiny impoverished village with red-dirt roads and mud-brick homes, that Ellen saw empty bellies filled, broken hearts mended, and crushed hopes restored.
The children arrive as orphans, but are adopted as members of a loving family. Each child is assigned to a home, where they live with their house mother and her assistant, who live with the children 24/7. Each home accommodates 8-12 children. Currently, there are ten homes, with more under construction. The children attend school at the Center and receive food and medical care. But most importantly, they receive love and acceptance. This love heals their wounds and offers them hope for the future.
It is with great joy that we offer our donation to the Kampala Children’s Center this Christmas, knowing that the lives of hundreds of children, both now and over the coming years, will be blessed by the love and healing they will receive at KCC.
So if you, too, are fed-up with buying just for the sake of buying, please consider partnering with us by giving differently this holiday season through a donation to KCC or to another organization that is close to your own heart.
Thank you and Happy Holidays,
Justin and Ellen
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