Vein Repetition

Sunday is World Blood Donor Day. The NHS needs around 2 1/2 million units of blood a year - if every Christian in the UK gave blood 3 times a year, we'd never run short.

I thought about giving blood for years before finally getting round to it a couple of years ago, and now its a habit. If that's you at the moment, maybe its time to get round to it. Once you start, those nice blood donor people ring you up to remind you to book your next appointment, so its a much easier habit to keep than going to gym.

You get free biscuits, and you may get to save a life. Tithe your platelets! 

Advent Conspiracy: Death and Presents or........?

[AC] Promo 2011 from Advent Conspiracy on Vimeo.

warning: sermon to myself follows.
40% of us are planning to spend less this Christmas. What if the other 60% could spend less and give away the balance? The average household spent over £600 on Christmas gifts last year. There's got to be a bit of slack in there somewhere, especially since that was the highest spend in Europe on Christmas gifts. That might just mean we're really generous, or it might just mean that we've forgotten how to express ourselves in any other way than shopping. Probably a mixture of both.

I was reading the story of the widows mite the other day: someone with virtually nothing, who gave out of her poverty, and is commended by Jesus. It would be wonderful to hear that divine 'well done' extended to a nation which chose life over Littlewoods. A nation which bailed out lives as well as banks. Because we will have to explain ourselves one day, and we'll look pretty silly holding a £350 Xbox surrounded by the graves of children whose lives could have been saved for a few quid.

Spread the Joy, not the Jaundice

3 ideas for making other people's Christmasses better

1. Give your bin lorry crew a crate of beer, just think what a mess you'd be in without them.

2. Don't shop until December 29th, that's next Tuesday. Monday 28th is supposed to be a Bank Holiday, but you could have fooled most workers in retail, who will be slaving away over a hot till. Our local Tesco corner shop will be shut on Christmas Day, and then reopens as normal for Sat 26th, Sun 27th etc. One day off for Jesus, 364 days on for Mammon. This only happens because there is the demand from shoppers. If nobody shopped from close of play tomorrow until next Tuesday, then there wouldn't be the demand for the shops to open. If they didn't open, millions of retail workers would get time with their families and friends to enjoy Christmas, instead of having to be back at work on Saturday for our retailing frenzy.

3. Instead of shoplifting, get your Christmas Eve congregations down to the local supermarket, blag all the perfectly edible food which is going to get thrown out and make up food parcels together. Ok it's a bit late to organise for this year....

Anything for an alternative to some of this: some extraordinary stuff both from the 'everyone's persecuting us' Christian Voice, and the National Secular Society, who use their seasonal message to fire both barrels at 'primitive' immigrants, compare faith schools to prisons, accuse Gordon Brown of being a lunatic and uses the charming epithet 'Taliban Tories'. Ironically, it's a message which starts off by protesting that the Christian faith spreads intolerance, bigotry and irrationality. Go figure. (Church Mouse is similarly disturbed)

The NSS should be glad the press haven't got hold of their line about Christmas celebrations in schools being 'soppy sentimental stories'. Far be it from me to wish the Daily Mail upon anyone, but this makes Nick Baines look like a pussycat....

Charity Begins at the Checkout

Update: different angle at RobinsonS, worth a look, and not so much to read!

By Saturday morning, Children in Need had raised over £20m from Friday night’s fundraising, with more to come from sales of the CiN single (great work by Peter Kay)



There were lots of donations from workplaces and high street stores, with a giant ASDA cheque seemingly in the background of every shot*. Plenty more will come from the merchandise, with Peter Kay appealing for the brilliant poster for the single above to be taken on by a high street name and distributed. The annual accounts for 2007-8 shows ‘corporate partnerships’ contributing nearly £5m to 2007’s total, whilst direct donations amount to £12m, and the rest is accounted for by fundraising (some of it organised and branded by corporates) and legacies.

Pudsey in Perspective
Children in Need, along with Comic Relief and the like, keeps the fun in fundraising, and it’s fantastic to see the generosity and compassion of thousands of people in action. At the same time I wonder what would happen if someone gatecrashed the stage and said ‘ladies and gentlemen, the war in Afghanistan is costing us £48m a week’. Raising over £500m over the last 20+ years is a wonderful achievement, but a few bonus-donating bankers would double that money.

That was Friday evening. Friday morning I was in a local shop buying Christmas cards, treading the line between staying within budget, and buying cards which gave more to charity. £4 for a pack which gives 25p per card sold, or £2.99 for a pack which ’supports the following charities’, but probably by not as much? Was I shopping, or giving to charity? Or both? Why was I finding 2 sets of values arguing with each other in my head over a few cartoon pictures of a stable?

The commercialisation of charity is an interesting one: ‘Give as You Spend’ is replacing Give as You Earn. For the businesses, it’s a chance to promote positive brand awareness (did you see those folks on CiN holding their jam up to the camera?) as well as raising money, for us it’s a chance to do what we like best – shop – and get a warm glow thrown in. From Fair Trade to charity Christmas cards, charities have worked out that we’re not going to start spending less and giving more, so it might just be easier to get us to spend differently. At the same time, the trend towards Gift Aiding entrance fees seems to have taken off – the chance to ‘donate’ your entrance fee (?) so that the National Trust, or whoever, can claim the tax back.

Homeopathic Giving
At the same time, the timing may be significant. We can now enter the Christmas shopping frenzy with a clear conscience: we’ve done our bit. Give the Children in Need CD to someone for Christmas, and everyone wins.

Perspective again: we’re forecast to spend an average of £358 each on presents this year. Even if Children in Need ends up with double last nights total, that will be roughly 65p per person in the UK. Of course, people will be giving in other ways too, not least through those Christmas cards, but there’s a sense of spiritual homeopathy: a small amount of giving diluted in a swimming pool of consumption equals ok.

The best solution, though it may disappoint the relatives, is Present Aid, where you send something useful to the developing world as a present, and your dearly beloved gets a card saying ‘you have sent a goat/toilet/water pump’, and is saved the bother of disposing of the wrapping paper, or working out where to put yet another ornament.

Giving Up?
Earlier this year, the Charities Aid Foundation reported that UK giving had fallen faster than the contraction in incomes – by 11% year on year. The number of people giving has stayed roughly the same – around 55% of the adult population – and on average they gave £31 each. Half of overall giving comes from just 2 million adults.

Even during a recession, most of the folk who still have jobs have got money to burn. If you can afford a Nintendo Wii, you’ve got money to burn. If you can afford a ticket to a Premiership match, or a bottle of wine with your meal out, or a Sky subscription, ditto. The charities folks calculate that £750m per year is lost to charity because taxpayers don’t Gift Aid all their donations. There is plenty of slack in the system. We have the weapons. We have motive. We have opportunity. So what’s missing?

*we used to live in an area where the ASDA Events Manager was the nearest thing we had to a community worker – she organised loads of events around the ASDA calendar (which was basically a series of opportunities to sell stuff to people, based on events like St. Patricks day, or a movie release), and in the absence of any community meeting space, helped to make the supermarket a good place for charitable work and a community focus.

This piece originally appeared on the Wardman Wire at the weekend. Recycling and all that.

Operation Christmas Child - a picture of joy

This is doing the rounds on Facebook, fantastic. If you've ever sent one of those shoeboxes, this is what happens when it gets to the other end. It almost doesn't matter what's inside it! (though I guess a mouldy half-eaten bap might be a bit of a let-down).



According to their Facebook page, Operation Christmas Child sent 1.2 million shoeboxes last year. Brilliant.