26 Acts...

 
I can't believe that Christmas is already over.  Last night, after putting about 1500 miles on our vehicle, traveling to Bel Air, New Jersey, and Maine, we finally crawled into our own beds.  And I am already missing my family!  From baking traditional Czech cookies and breads with my sister Kristen, to playing Monopoly five billion times with my nephews, to dancing with my nieces to Christmas music, to going to the Lancaster City Market with my entire family, to cramming into "Duck Fat" Restaurant in Portland with my mother-in-law (which is a yuppie restaurant according to her!), to hanging out with my extended family in Jersey for a Czech Christmas Eve bash, to watching the Golden Pig come, to putting up the Nativity with my nieces, to building a Rice Krispy Train with my nephews, to sharing around our table Christmas morning all that we are thankful for...we truly did it all and I am more than blessed.  At the end of this vacation, I realized my love for my family only grows stronger each time I am with them, and I can't wait until we bring home little ones that will be included in all the fun.

At the start of this Christmas Season I had decided that I would not focus on "hoping" or "wishing" or even "praying" for a Christmas miracle in this adoption process.  All I wanted to do was find ways to be grateful for our waiting process, spend time with my family, and bring hope where I could this season.  So, when my sister Heather posted on Facebook that she was interested in doing 26 Acts (a challenge that Ann Curry had posted on Twitter to "do 26 random acts of kindness in memory of the victims of the Newtown, CT shooting"), I jumped at the chance to help.  In fact, our entire family decided we were in.  The weekend leading up to Christmas, our family participated in 26 Acts that ranged from giving bags of hope to salvation army bell ringers, to paying for people's parking in a garage, to buying donuts for elderly men, to visiting people in the hospital, to giving Dunkin and Starbucks cards to police officers, to Christmas caroling as a family, to buying and delivering a loaf of bread to a random table in a restaurant, to paying for someones drive through order, to handing out bags of candy to strangers.  But the highlight for us was going into Macy's, Toy's R Us, and Target to hand out cake pops.

When we started brainstorming ideas of what we could do, we decided it would be cool to go to a few of the stores that were going to be open 24 hours the two nights leading up to Christmas.  So, our family ventured into Macy's first and just started passing out cake pops.  The reaction was awesome!  People were like, "Seriously...this is for us?  Really?  Why are you doing this?  You just brought a tear to my eye and a lump in my throat.  This is the nicest thing anyone has ever done.  I am seriously posting this on my Facebook.  I can't believe this."  All we did was give one little cake pop.

I don't share our random acts of kindness stories to make our family look good or to say we are some kind of "great" family.  I share them, because I learned something that weekend.  It doesn't take much to make a small difference in this world.  We never know people's stories.  Whether it is the elderly man who is barely making it through a city market, a store clerk who is working yet another 12 hour shift, a couple who has locked their keys in their car for the 15th time, or a family who is just in need of some hope, we each have in us the power to choose kindness.

I can't really explain to you how ridiculously addictive Random Acts of Kindness became for our family that weekend.  It will not only go down in the history books as one of the greatest Christmas weekends we have ever had together as a family, but hopefully, it will now be something we carry into our lives every day...practicing kindness every chance we get.  Who knows...choosing kindness might just change the world.

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