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Christmas Presents: To Give or to Get

by Traute Klein, biogardener

Christmas, a time to give or to receive? How do we raise our children? A heartwarming story to show that the spirit of giving is alive and well in our community.

The Spirit of Giving

December 1986. I was getting discouraged listening to children and adults alike talk about the presents they were hoping to receive from Santa. This was so different from the Advent spirit in which I grew up and which I have tried to foster in my own family and among the children I taught in school.

I grew up in tough times in World War II Germany. Every item of food was rationed. Never mind food, everything was rationed. The only things which were free for the taking were love and appreciation. My mother was the most giving person I have ever known. She had grown up in the most affluent home in her community and was raised with a sense of responsibility to care for the less fortunate. Even in hard times when she barely knew how to feed her children, she would open her heart and home to perfect strangers.

I came to believe that every family practices the same generosity. It never occurred to me not to share whatever I had with whoever needed it. It was not until I came to North America, the land of plenty, that I noticed that giving was not a everyone's heritage.

German Christmas

Back to December 1986. Yes, I was getting discouraged. Was no one in the spirit of giving? Had the spirit of getting swallowed up our society?

December 24, 1986, Christmas Eve, the German Christmas, the evening when the children present their offerings to the Christ child and to the congregation. Of all the services of the year, this is the one I do not ever want to miss. We spend it in the last German-speaking church in Winnipeg. All the services are conducted in German, including the Sunday school. Taking part in that service is like stepping back into my own childhood.

At the end of the service, every child receives a bag with assorted fruit, cookies, and candy. I remember when families saved food rations for months to be able to have a few Christmas goodies for the children.

There are enough bags in this church even for the many young people. They had also taken part in the service, playing in the band and singing in the young people's choir. It had been a most enjoyable evening for me, but the enjoyment was not yet over.

As we prepared to leave the church, one of the young people, Ron Schuler, came to shake the hands of my husband and me and to wish us a blessed Christmas. That is not unusual. All Germans do it. What was unusual was that he handed me his Christmas bag. That was my best Christmas present. Not the bag, but the realization that the spirit of giving was not dead, that it lives on among the young.

Raised in the Spirit of Giving

What made Ron so different from other young people in Winnipeg? He was born to parents who came from exactly the same background as I, having grown up in the same war in the same country with the same scarcity and the same attitude to giving. When the children were still very young, both parents were killed in a car accident. The children were split up to be raised by relatives in Canada and the United States. Even though they rarely saw each other, they remain a close-knit harmonious unit to this day. And all of them feel a sense of responsibility to their community.

Ron Schuler is now the MLA (member of the legislative assembly, provincial government) for the ward in which our farmland is located, and a more caring and conscientious MLA would be hard to find. I am proud to call him my friend.