YAISHWARYAJ: {Awareness} A Timeless Gift - White Christmas [2 Attachments]

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Pedagogical Project

"The Joy of Reading"

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Stories for Everyone – stories on Slideshare

Stories for Everyone – stories on Facebook

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This week's stories with PDF attachments:

- A Timeless Gift

- White Christmas

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A Timeless Gift

Shopping for a Christmas gift can be the most nerve-wracking event of the year. Shopping for my wife can be a special challenge. Vacuum cleaners are too impersonal, football tickets are too impractical, and kitchen gadgets are downright impossible.

I was at a loss, with Christmas fast approaching. In desperation, I asked my secretary Sally, to help me pick out a present.

We walked side by side in a fast-paced walk, two blocks to the jewelry store. Working in the downtown business district had its advantages; being close to a lot of shopping places was one of them. However, there were disadvantages as well. On the way, our path crossed a couple of homeless men, huddled together by a vent from one of the nearby buildings.

I started to cross the street to avoid them, but traffic was too thick. Just before we approached, I switched sides with Sally to keep them from confronting her. They were surely going to beg for money, pretending to buy food, but any donation would surely end up as beer or wine. As we got closer, I could see that one was probably in his mid-thirties and the other was a boy of school age—around thirteen or fourteen. Both were dressed shabbily, the older with a too-tight sport coat ripped at the sleeve, while the boy was without a coat at all, only a tattered shirt separating him from the blowing wind. A quarter or two and they´ll leave us alone, I thought. "I´ll handle this," I sai d with my best male bravado.

But Sally seemed undisturbed by the sight of the two beggars. In fact, she seemed comfortable in their presence. Before they asked she offered.

"Is there anything I can do for you?" she directed her question to the two homeless men. I was in shock, waiting to pull Sally away from a dangerous situation, but she stood firm.

The two men looked at her with surprise until the older one spoke up. "Yes, ma´am. We do need something."

Here it comes—the hook, the gouge, I thought. The two pan handlers are looking for a handout, an easy mark. As I watched, I could tell the younger boy was shivering in the winter breeze, but what could I do?

"Could you tell us the time?" asked the older man. Sally glanced at her watch and replied, "Twelve-fifteen." He nodded his thanks and didn´t say another word. We continued on our way to the jewelry store, and I had to ask Sally about the encounter.

"Why did you ask if you could help that man?"

"He was cold and in need, that´s why," she replied in a matter-of-fact tone.

"But he´s a bum. He could have tried to rob you or something."

"I take care of myself. But sometimes you have to take a chance on someone."

We arrived at the jewelry store, and Sally quickly found the perfect gift for my wife—a pair of diamond earrings. While she was there, she bought a man´s watch, not an expensive one, but she was always thrifty. Probably a gift for her husband, I thought.

As we walked back to our building, the two vagabonds were still hovering around the sidewalk grate. Once again, I tried to come between Sally and the two, but she wouldn´t let me. To my surprise, when we got next to them, she pulled the watch out of the bag and handed it to the older man.

"Here, I´m sure you know how to use it."

He was as shocked as I was. "Thank you, much obliged, ma´am," said, trying the watch on his wrist. As we walked away Sally had tears in her eyes, proud of what she had done.

"Why on Earth did you do that?"

Sally shrugged and said, "God has been so good to me, and Idecided to do something good for him."

"But he didn´t deserve it."

"Even the poor want something special, and besides, God´s done things for me that I don´t deserve—but He did them anyway."

"He´s probably going to buy beer with that watch."

Sally just smiled at me and said, "Well, so what if he does? That´s not my concern. I did something for good and that´s all that matters. What he does with the watch is his challenge."

We arrived back at our building and went into our separate offices. I wondered about the encounter, and I thought about the men. Surely they were at the pawnshop, getting ready for a hot line at Sally´s expense.

The next day I was going to lunch alone at a hamburger stand outside our building. As I walked down the street, I noticed the same two men that Sally and I had encountered.

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(To be continued in the PDF attachment)

Harrison Kelly

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White Christmas

´Christmas is coming,´ people were saying at Rushida´s school.

´What´s the best thing about Christmas?´ Rushida asked her friend Jane.

´Presents,´ said Jane immediately. ´You get lots of presents. And good things to eat—roast turkey and Christmas pudding.´

´I don´t know if we´ll have that,´ said Rushida doubtfully. ´What else happens?´

´Parties happen,´ said Jane. ´And there´s the Nativity play the Infants are doing—you´ll see it next week. It´s all about Jesus being born in a stable.´

Rushida and Jane were first year Juniors. They felt older than the Infants, whose classrooms were in a different part of the school buildings.

´I was an angel last year in the play, before you came,´ Jane said dreamily, remembering. ´It was because I´m fair. I look like an angel, see? Me and Sharon and Mandy and Denise, we were all angels. We had wings. One of mine fell off, I was all lop-sided! You´d have laughed. And you were funny too, when you couldn´t speak any English. But I liked you.´

Rushida giggled at the memory too. She and her family had come to England from Bangladesh at the end of February. She remembered how cold she had felt. She remembered many, many things.

´I wanted to ask you how you could see out of your blue eyes,´ she told Jane. ´I hadn´t seen blue or green eyes before England. I thought perhaps the people who had them were blind.´

´Blind! Don´t be silly!´ cried Jane. She began to wrestle with Rushida, both of them laughing, until Miss Robinson, their form teacher, stopped them.

´You two,´ she said, ´one so dark and the other so fair, but you´ve a lot in common. You´re both a couple of Tomboys.´

´What´s tomboys, then?´ asked Rushida.

´Girls who are better than boys!´ cried Jane. ´Girls who like cars and aeroplanes just as much as dolls.´

´Come on, everybody, sit down,´ said Miss Robinson to the whole class. ´I´m going to read you a story about Christmas. It´ll be here soon. Anybody done some Christmas shopping yet?´

Some of the children answered her, but Rushida kept silent. She knew that Christmas was going to be another of those things that weren´t the same for Muslim families, such as her own. Her family had festivals to celebrate, but they were different ones. Early last summer, there had been Eid, coming after the month´s fast of Ramadan. For all that time the grownups in her family had eaten and drunk nothing between the hours of sunrise and sunset: their religion had forbidden it. When it was all over, there had been a big party with lots of good food, and she and her older sister, and her nine-year old brother, Ahmed, and her two-year ol d baby brother had all had new clothes.

The story that Miss Robinson was reading out loud was called ´White Christmas´ and it was about snow coming on Christmas Day, and changing the world. Rushida listened with her mouth open. She had heard of snow before, but never seen it. How she longed to see it and find out what it was really like!

When she got home that afternoon she asked her cousin Hassan about snow. Hassan had been in England with his parents and his older brothers since he was five, and now he was twelve. They all lived in the top half of Rushida´s house. Hassan´s father and Rushida´s father were brothers.

´Snow is like ice-cream. It comes from the sky and covers the whole world, and you can eat it, only you mustn´t eat too much, because then all your insides freeze and you turn into a snowman,´ said Hassan, his eyes glinting.

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(To be continued in the PDF attachment)

Nina Beachcroft

Dennis Pepper

The Oxford Christmas Storybook

Oxford, O. U. P., 1993

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