As the holiday season crept upon us this dreadful year of 2020, I wondered how my family might find the holiday spirit in such a spiritless year. We’re being asked to socially distance, hunker down and simply stay put for the holidays – being asked to do the effortless task of nothing – so we can end this mess we’ve created for ourselves. Like many families during these trying times, we are following the rules and thusly, disheartened that it will be exactly one year since we’ve all been together and since most of us have seen each other.

Unlike most families though, we are completely deranged when it comes to making Christmas plans. As soon as the calendar flips to spring, we’re thinking about where Christmas will be: “We’ve only got 8 months – we need to start planning!” As the youngest member of the family, I’m not sure exactly when or how this all started. I know my grandma absolutely loved Christmas. It was important to her that our small clan come together every year to share the holiday spirit. While my grandpa was more in touch with the spirit of the Holy Ghost, grandma was in tune with the true spirit of the season.

Throughout the years, our small clan has taken advantage of this vast country – spreading out from our origins in the Midwest to the East Coast, Florida, Rocky Mountains and eventually to the tiptop of Washington State. I bet if you showed a random person a map of where we all live, that person might guess we don’t want to see each other – logistically speaking. But even with that distance, we have made valiant efforts over the years to spend December 25 with one another.

I could write pages and pages of our family Christmas gatherings: beers that stole Christmas,  questionable sleeping configurations and a confusing amount of secrets and surprise visits. But for now, I am talking about this year: 2020. Not being able to gather together, we discussed how we might celebrate the spirit of the season together. We wanted to find a way to share the holiday spirit of cheer and gift giving, even when the world doesn’t feel so joyful. So with those thoughts in mind, we agreed we would give donations to organizations that are meaningful to each of us personally.

So, in the spirit of giving, I am sharing with my family the organizations to which I donated and a little information about how that gift keeps giving. I selected two national organizations that represent the hardships to 2020 and two local organizations that helped me make it through 2020.