This is the time of year when requests for donations increase tenfold. If you have not received a dozen calendars, packs of wrapping paper or greeting cards, a glitzy set of address labels or a hard plastic card displaying next year’s calendar in print that will blind you without a magnifier, you are lucky as you are apparently off the grid when it comes to charities.
Organizations seem to feel that, in sending you cost-minimal items you may use, you will feel like contributing to their cause out of a sense of guilt, obligation or because you forgot when you last wrote them a check. The common gist of most conversations between people who are inundated with charity guilt swag is that, if the organizations didn’t send all the stuff, they could put the costs into the very cause for which they are trying to get your money.
Some folks are quite particular about what appears on their address labels, and not everybody likes to see their name incorrectly listed on a twenty page notepad which might be spotted at the supermarket with the grocery list on it.
One can also only use one or two calendars at a time (except a friend of mine, who buys about five versions of polar bear and panda calendars every year). The ones you don’t use tend to wind up in the “take one, give one” pile at the office. Sometimes this works for people who don’t go out and buy a themed calendar for their cubicle.
I tend to give to charities every month except December. That is the one month when people tend to remember to be charitable, so I declare December a month of rest. My charity list will hear from me again next year, when everybody else forgets that people starve January through November, too.
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