It's the Season of Giving

I've always fostered traditions for my family at Christmas time. I believe this is what makes Christmas special for us, the anticipation of the rituals of the season and the happiness evoked from that. For us, sharing some kindness through out December has become part of the tradition and this year it became a daily event of the Christmas advent with the introduction of R.A.O.Ks.

Random Acts of Kindness seem to have gathered momentum around the world. When devising our family's list, there was plenty of inspiration from blogs, websites and Pinterest. We sat down one night about a month ago together and thought of some ideas that might work for us. My new advent calendar (Dusty Attic) is now the R.A.O.K. calendar - a different idea for each day.

Some R.A.O.Ks that we did this year included:

• baking cakes for the police and fire departments
• leaving candycanes at ATMs
• putting 'Instant Kiwis' (scratchies) on car windscreens
• donating toys to the charity tree
• giving one of my 'family and baby' artworks to the local maternity unit
• opening up my Christmas house and donating the money to Hospice
• leaving vases of flowers at people's doorsteps
• giving the newspaper person, the postie and rubbish truck drivers gifts
• buying a coffee for the next person in line
• leaving a Christmas CD for someone to find
• donating clothes to the Salvation Army
• giving sweets to the swimming pool lifeguards
• baking snickerdoodle cookies for our neighbours
• singing carols at the local resthome

On reflection it has required a fair amount of organisation but has been a lot of fun....the sight of my 6 foot son sneaking a vase of flowers over to a friend's door was priceless, and the younger boys loved distributing out the R.A.O.Ks on windscreens, ATMs and to people. Definitely now part of our Christmas traditions!