There's a gift-giving charity at Christina's office. Kids from underprivileged families hang tags on the tree with their one big wish for Christmas. Some of these things are reasonable: an action figure, a football. Some are too practical to have actually been thought up by the kids themselves: socks, school supplies. And some are just pipe dreams, as if no one could quite manage to tell the kid, "Hey, no one's ever gonna buy that high-priced item. It's not in Santa's budget."
The order in which these items get removed from the tree to be purchased by the members of the department is the same as I mentioned them. It is a university, after all, so first the cheap fun stuff goes, then the inexpensive boring stuff, and finally the big-ticket stuff, if those tags go at all. Some people just donate money, so if there are any kids whose gifts weren't selected from the tree, they can at least get some consolation prize.
Christina, who had been in California for two weeks, returned to her office to discover that only the big-ticket tags were left. She debated about not getting anything at all, or just donating a bit of cash. Like everyone else, our budget has been a bit stretched as of late, and Christmas is already a bit leaner than we would like. On the drive home we talked about it, and she expressed a bit of wonderment at the fact that one kid named Denardo (go ahead, try not to snicker) asked for a DVD player.
Being who I am, my heart went out to the kid, and I told Christina that if we could make his Christmas with a used DVD player, it was worth it. To make a long story short, fifty bucks and a trip to the pawn shop later, Denardo's DVD player is sitting under the tree. It's not shiny and new, it's not a brand anyone's ever heard of, but dammitall, it plays DVDs. Plus, it's got a remote and the cables for hooking it up to the TV. Christina gets credit for actually carrying out the plan; since the tree isn't in my office, I probably would have forgotten Denardo and his Christmas wish. I'm glad she didn't.
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