I have been in Provo since the first of the month spending time with my stepson and his wife and my little granddaughter. She will be three in February. The last few days she has been helping me wrap presents and has faced the concept that a few of the really cool things Grandma bought are not for her. She gets a very sad face and does her best to tug at my heartstrings and maybe change my mind. That is to be expected. She is two.

In anticipation of this, I brought a Berenstain Bear book about the cubs getting a case of the “galloping greedy gimmies.” Sometimes, however, it isn't only kids who get the gimmies. One of the things that robs us of much of the joy of the season is looking around at what someone else has.

I'll never forget the year I talked my husband into purchasing a red convertible instead of the conservative car he was looking at. All I said was, “If we're going to spend that much, why don't we get something fun like that convertible over there.” He sat in it for a few minutes, and the next thing I knew, we were proud owners of what I called my “mid-life Chrysler.” When we drove up to church the next day, I joked to a friend of mine that it was my Mother's Day present. She ran ahead into the church, trumpeting that news, and the rest of the day that was all I heard about. “Don only got me . . . “

That car served me well for over eleven years and is now rusting in peace, but it served to ruin Mother's Day for many of my sisters who immediately became discontented with the gifts they had received, not to mention the brothers who could not compete with what had only been jokingly referred to as a gift.

Teaching Charity

I decided as a mother that early on I was going to teach my son about charity. One year when he was little, and I was in another of my creative phases, I purchased several small Pound Puppies, the hot gift item that year. I had a small business making Barbie Doll clothes, and I had branched out into a line I called “Woof Woof Wear” for Pound Puppies, riding the wave of their popularity by making puppy clothes and selling them at a couple of local toy stores. I made pajamas in cute Christmas prints for the puppies we were going to take up to the Primary Children's Hospital. In the meantime, my son started playing with the puppies. I knew I was in trouble when he gave them names.

As we headed to the hospital, I tried to help a devastated little boy understand that the puppies he had grown to love were going to make some other children happy, children who were in the hospital and didn't have all the toys to play with that he did. When we gave them to the nurses at the hospital, they could tell he was having a hard time parting with the stuffed animals.

One of them took him aside, talked to him, and the next thing I knew, he came back smiling and hugging a huge action figure to his chest. She had taken him and given him his choice of all the toys that had been donated. I feared the lesson I had worked so hard to teach him had been lost. The message he seemed to take away from the experience was that if you gave something to someone, you got something even better in return.

I am thankful that I had many more opportunities to teach him about being charitable. I told him that when you have the same initials as Santa Claus, as we both do, that you are his special elf. He is old enough now to know that the better thing you get in return is a warm feeling in your heart.

That and a red convertible will get you to the mall.