Daily Read #32 - Twelve Days of Christmas

So I had intended to post this yesterday as it would have been the official start day of the 12 days of Christmas. As it were the Great Disconnect of 2010 has created a little bit of a good reads bottleneck.

Have you heard of the Twelve Days of Christmas? No not the annoying tune with lords a leaping, drummes drumming, maids a-milking and a menagerie of birds in a pear tree. The Twelve days of Christmas is kind of like secret Santa but you choose who you give to and it's not just a single gift you bring them but twelve days of Christmas cheer often à la edible goods or small Christmas trinkets.

One of our family's traditions was to do one and sometimes two 12 days of Christmas targets a year. We would start on the 13th and finish on Christmas eve.

Almost always we stayed anonymous not an easy feat if the target really wants to know who you are. We got pretty good at running though so it got harder to catch us and growing up one of our favorite targets were widows in our church as they were easy for little kids to do the ring and run part of twelve days.

I think twelve days were a fantastic tradition for a couple of reasons.

First, I think that doing something for others is a great way to not think so much about yourself. Kids need that around the holidays (Adults need it all year round).

Our family was not rich and though I don't think that 12 days was ever a huge monetary commitment* it helped teach us that wealth is not defined by how much you have but how much you give. [Also the product of a mom who planned for it well in advance].

Twelve day's targets were very rarely charity cases in the eyes of the world. Most often we chose people who we wanted to know that someone in the world really cared about them. Hunger and poverty are serious problems but so is loneliness. We may feel more interconnected with family and friends than every before thanks to modern technology, however one of the problems with our increasingly tight knit social web is that it's essentially blindfolded us to those outside of it. Twelve days targets raised our level of social awareness; they helped us to see those people who otherwise would have occupied our blindspot.

Probably the greatest challenge with twelve days is that it requires consistency for a good portion month of December. However anytime you can inject some regularity into the holiday chaos it's a good thing. [This is one of the reasons why I am a Bran-maniac until the new years].

So if you need more details on how your family could do the Twelve Days. Comment below. If not I hope that you are finding some traditions that mean to your kids what Twelve days meant to us.