“Adopt a family”

This is just a 5-minute gripe.

This is that time of year when we’re all encouraged to donate toys so that poor unfortunate children can “have a Christmas,” and when various organizations “sponsor” families to provide them with gifts for the children, grocery money for Christmas day, etc.

My sister, who’s quite involved in this sort of thing, spent part of Thanksgiving studying the sale ads to see what the best toy sales were for the foster children whose wish list she’s trying to fulfill.  Suggested spend per child:  $100 – $125.

At the same time, our church does a similar adopt-a-child:  pick an envelope from the back of the church, write a check which will be used to buy gift cards which will be given to the mother to buy gifts for her children.  I participated for a while, but never liked the feeling that I couldn’t know how my check compared to other participating families’ donations — was “my” family getting more or less per child than the other families?

And this year, on the day that the donations were due to be turned in, to give the recipient parents time to shop for their children, there were still large, large numbers of “unsponsored” families.

Now, partly, this is a matter of how Advent and Thanksgiving fell this year in the calendar.  But in addition (and this is just speculation):   is people’s generosity — not spread too thin — but bunched too tightly?  — so that some children receive a Christmas present bounty and others are left in the cold?