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How to Help this Holiday Season

As the holiday season grows near, I have started to become more and more aware of my surroundings. I now realize that I should be thankful for all the things I already have.

I especially think of how lucky I am during the holidays.

Every Thanksgiving, my parents would invite every one of our relatives in the Bay Area to a feast at our house. Although our house is not what most people would consider big, we would somehow be able to cram everyone in. I would wait the whole year for this very day — there seemed to be almost every type of food imaginable, and all my cousins would come over too. What more could a kid ask for?

One year, everything changed. My dad decided to quit his job, after supporting the family for all these years, and my mother was just finishing her job training at a local community college. Now our family had no source of income. However, my mother decided she was ready to start her career by opening her very own beauty parlor. Our family thought it was a great idea, but it would be risky, since using all our money to start up the business would put our family in debt for a while. Although our money problems were quite obvious, my parents always tried to shelter me from all the hardships we were going through. They never mentioned anything about money around my sister or myself and they always provided us with everything we needed. Still, I couldn’t help but overhear gossip from other family members. That year my parents told me that we weren’t going to have our annual Thanksgiving feast, even though I had been looking forward to it all year. I was devastated, but I was old enough to understand that it wasn’t anyone’s fault.

That same year, we were invited to many other holiday gatherings put together by other family members. It seemed as if it was all out of pity, but my mother didn’t want to be rude, so we attended every single one of those dinners. Seeing so many people willing to help us out was pretty inspiring. I felt thankful to have people that cared about us when the times got rough, and eventually things started to pick up. Now my mother makes enough money to support my dad, my sister and I.

Eventually, I started to think about other people. What if there were others out there who really needed help but didn’t have anyone who cared enough to lend a hand? The thought of needy people out there stayed with me, and it was all I could think about for a very long time. I really wanted to help out in some way.

A few years ago, I started to become active in the community and helped out by doing various community service projects in my neighborhood. I soon realized that although I am just one person, there are many little things I can do to help. For example, last year, I participated in Harvest Home, where a group of local youth from Cameron House went around the Richmond district of San Francisco passing out flyers and asking for non-perishable canned goods. The following week, the same group of youth walked the streets collecting donations from the houses where the flyers were distributed. The canned goods were then redistributed to less fortunate families in Chinatown and the Tenderloin. This year we are going around San Francisco collecting cans once again. If you would like to make a contribution, but we did not stop by your house, checks can be made out to Cameron House or donations can be dropped off at Donaldina Cameron House in Chinatown.

Contributing to the community can be done in many ways besides donations. For instance, many of my closest friends volunteer at local homeless shelters or youth organizations to help those who are in need. Volunteers are still needed to help out homeless children at Compass Community Services, located in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. And then there are the soup kitchens and homeless shelters. With today’s technology, hundreds of volunteer opportunities can be reached through the Internet. So this holiday season, remember that no matter how bad you think you’ve got it, there is always somebody worse off than you, so it never hurts to help.