The Meaning of Christmas - How We Can Help Others

What Christmas means to us will depend on many things. For the more fortunate of us, it will mean something very different than for those who are going through a difficult time. How do we share our good fortune in order to give Christmas more meaning?

Christmas for many is a feeling of joy; a feeling of warmth and love and time spent together with family and friends. It is a feeling of wanting to share, of giving and thinking of others who are not as fortunate. And for others it is about decorating, baking Christmas goodies, and getting stressed and overly anxious. For many also it is a time to celebrate their religion.

For children it is often about the presents and what they are going to get and the excitement of Santa coming. It may also be about the fun things there are to do during this time of the year - seeing light displays, visiting Santa, making gingerbread houses and the Christmas concert at school.

For those who are not so fortunate, ones without families or perhaps with only a few friends, with little or no money, or for someone whose family lives far away or who has recently become widowed or divorced, it will mean loneliness, unhappiness and another difficult time to get through. If we are one of the fortunate ones, the following are some ideas of how we can reach out and help someone else during the Christmas season:

- We can invite someone to share Christmas Day with us who would otherwise be alone;
- We can give a hamper to help a family through the season;
- We can give gifts to their children;
- We can take someone who has few friends or no family out for lunch;
- We can make an effort to phone a lonely person several times during the Christmas season to let them know that someone is thinking about them;
- We can encourage others to share and hold out their hand in friendship to someone who would otherwise be lonely at this time of the year;
- We can include them in things we may be doing, i.e.: invite them along to go tobogganing or to play in the snow with our children; invite them over for tea and if they have children, for a play date with our children;
- We can look outside of ourselves and our own families to see what we can do for others less fortunate during this holiday season when being alone feels more lonely than at any other time of the year.

If we do something for someone else, even if it is only one thing, it will enhance our own Christmas and our feelings about what the season is all about.