Brian and I celebrate the winter holidays mainly by acknowledging just how very fortunate we already are. (So, lovely family members reading this, please don’t feel the need to buy us any gifts. We’d ask this even if we weren’t planning on carrying around our worldly possessions on our backs for the next year and eight months.)
For us, we’d much rather donate money that would be spent on gifts to organizations doing work that we think is important, and we set aside about 5% of our income to fund these gifts. This year, we’ve donated to PATH, ACCION International, and the UN Refugee Agency.
We’re also fond of gifts that don’t involve money and created a site last year dedicated to this: Gift Instead. While my plans to update the site this season were foiled by general busyness, please send us any suggestions that you have for next year.
