A Gift – for Inspiration

Yesterday, I went on the most wonderful date with my friend. We’ve known each other for 20-some years, and she is the one I call at 3 am when all hell has broken loose, or I am just really sad or really happy. She is the first one I told, when I was once proposed to, at the stoke of Midnight on a New Years Eve, by a guy I had known for 3 months, whom I was desperately in love with. She was present during the birth of both my boys, is Godmother to both and she will give the eulogy at my funeral. Unless she dies first, in which case, I will give hers. She is my life-witness and she GETS me. I am always wiser after having talked to her, I love her outlook on life – she is very different from me and yet, she is – my soulmate.

So, yesterday, she told me about a wonderful thing she did:

Her grandmother, now 93, recently moved into a retirement home. She lost her husband, her youngest daughter and had basically been through a very rough couple of years. So my friend decided to make her… A Christmas Calendar!

Here, it is customary to give children a “Christmas Calendar” on December 1st – either it is a box with 24 little doors and behind each door, is a small piece of chocolate or a small picture or story. A more elaborate version is the “Gift Calendar” when the child – or lucky adult – gets a basket with 24 presents – one for each of the 24 days in December before we hit the 24th, which is when we celebrate Christmas Eve.

So, my friend rounded up her two cousins and each person got 8 “days” to prepare a “gift” for the Grandmother.

Each day, she would open an envelope or a small box and in it would be – a memory. They really got into it and had decorated it beautifully – like my friend’s memory of her Confirmation; She would describe how she and the Grandmother went dress-shopping together, how exciting the fitting was and what a wonderful day that had been. She had inserted a picture of herself, 14 years old, wearing her lovely confirmation dress.

Another day’s gift was a letter saying how a visit to the city was never complete with out a visit by the Grandparents, who lived there. How thrilling it was to call and say: Me and my friend a coming by, may we have lunch? – and almost like on the best of restaurants, one could order one’s favorite things for lunch and the Grandmother would set the table with napkins and flowers and candles and make all those goodies. So the girls would come and eat, and show off what they had bought and tell all about what was going on in the lives of 15-year olds, 23-year olds, 28 year-olds and so on, as the years went by and the girls grew up.

In order to give her the “Calendar”, they all three visited her and gave it to her together. Naturally, the Grandmother was touched by this wonderful gesture and she was crying when she said: “In my 93 years, I have never before even had a Christmas Calendar”.

The calendar turned out to be quite the crowd-pleaser too; Everyone at the retirement home got into it, everyday they would come by her room in their walkers, with their canes or in their wheelchairs: “What did you get today?”

My friend almost welled up when she finished her story by saying: “Making that calendar was the best thing I did last year.”

So I pass this inspirational story on to you: It is free, it is easy and it makes a hell of a difference: Go tell someone you love, what a difference they have made in your life. Tell them that you love them!

…

I love you!