5 Dollars

Last week, I went out to dinner with my boss and the two ladies who work in my department for a little holiday celebration.  Since my boss is not from the area, we decided to take her out to a town about 30 minutes from our office.  This particular area is great to walk around and has a lot of wonderful restaurant choices so it sounded the like the perfect idea.  We even thought ahead and got a restaurant recommendation.  It was all going smoothly, until…

Our perfect night began to derail when we realized the cute little town that we thought we would get to walk around was closed.  Even at the height of the Christmas shopping season, all the shops were shut down by the time we got there at 7:30pm.  Ok well the Gap was open but that wasn’t quite what we were looking for.  Then when we got to the restaurant, we realized that it was a BYOB and we were missing our own B.  As we walked around checking out other menus for different restaurants, we had a hard time finding anything that seemed as appealing as our first choice.  Finally when we were leaving a sushi bar we had considered going to, we decided to ask two ladies standing outside of that restaurant for their advice on where to go.  Turns out they were from the area and had lots of great suggestions for us and right at the top of their list was the BYOB that we had originally wanted to go to. 

When we told them that that particular restaurant was where we wanted to go in the first place, they insisted that we had to go there and gave us directions to a liquor store within walking distance.  However, when we got to the liquor store, it was closed.  This whole evening had gone from great idea to complete disaster in just about an hour. 

After striking out at the liquor store, we started walking again in search of a place to have dinner.  As we waited at a cross walk to cross the street, we ran into the two ladies who had given us directions to the liquor store.  They were in their car at the red light and yelled out to us asking if we got our wine.  We told them the store was closed.  They yelled back us to go to the restaurant and they would bring us some wine.  To be honest, I thought they were crazy!  No one would really go buy wine for a group of strangers and deliver it to them just so that someone could eat at particular restaurant.  That just doesn’t happen in reality.  20 minutes later, we were sitting in the BYOB with two bottles of wine at our table.

The best part of the story is that when these two strangers showed up to deliver the bottles to us, they wouldn’t take a dime.  They simply said just enjoy it and pay it forward.  I spent the rest of the night thinking "did that just really happen" and for the past few days, I’ve really been looking for a way to pay that simple act of kindness forward.  So far I haven’t come up with anything but the other day I saw a news story on the Salvation Army and how their holiday collection effort was where they generated the majority of their funds for the whole year.  Today when I walked in the mall, there was a gentleman outside the door with his bell and red bucket collecting money for the organization.  Normally I would give the change in my pocket or a dollar if I happened to have one but today, I felt like this was maybe my opportunity to pay it forward.  So I dug deep in my pockets, pulled out my last 5 dollars and dropped it into the bucket outside the mall.

So on the 5^th day of Christmas, I gave the last 5 dollars I had on me to someone who needed it more than I did.  I could have used that money for a latte at Starbucks, lunch out, or a hundred other things but I think I spent the money in the best way possible.  Christmas is supposed to be about the giving.  It doesn’t matter how much you give, but the thought you put behind what you give.  Yes it really is the thought that counts.  Sure there are a million big things that I could have done to help humanity and pay it forward but at the end of the day, the little things are needed just as much as the big things. At the time of year where we are all so focused on what we want and we will get, it's extremely important that don’t lose sight of the giving part of the holidays.