Merry Christmas

It's that time of year again. The trouble is as you get further into your twenties - firmly making your way into fully fledged adulthood - that Christmas gets more and more complicated. However the aspect that really bugs me is the sending of Christmas cards. Maybe it's a modern problem but you don't seem to have people's addresses other than your best friends and your family. Your wider social network are the sort of people you communicate with via email or mobiles. The concept of an address book that actually contains postal addresses is rapidly becoming alien in the twentieth century.

So I was struck with a solution. Rather than sending tedious emails to people asking them for their addresses to post cards to, making them feel guilty in turn so they feel they need to send a card, not to mention desperately trying to subtlety find out the address of the people you have already somehow received a card from - I saw a way out. I decided to make a charitable donation of £50 and let everyone know I was doing this instead of sending them Christmas cards. This blog is visible to most of my friends thanks to the wonders of Facebook so I can let them all know via it, and also it gives me something to blog about over this period of time where I'm too knackered to blog properly because I'm out getting pissed at Christmas drinks too often.

However my simple plan then hit a snag. I headed off to Just Giving to find my charity and make my donation thinking it would take about 5 minutes max. Trouble is I hadn't really given any thought to what I was going to give the money to. Normally I give money to charities when I get contacted by one in some form or another and it strikes me as a good idea. Faced with the choice of over two and a half thousand charities I was more than flummoxed.

After a huge amount of aimless searching I tried to think if I had heard of any charities recently that really stuck out to me. I suddenly thought of the Centre For Social Justice who give awards to charities every year. I've always looked at their lists and nodded along thinking these were good causes so I went there. It didn't help. I was still faced with the difficult choices - do I want to go global or local for example. In the 2007 awards list two charities are listed next to each other -

- XLP, working with gun and gang culture in Peckham, SE London
- Tree Aid, helping poor African families generate income through responsible use of forests

One is extremely local and one is extremely global. Both look good.

And by now I had got worried about public reaction. Announcing you're giving money to a charity rather than sending Christmas cards was starting to seem a very smug and arrogant thing to do. "Sorry my nearest and dearest but since I am so much more socially conscious than you I am not going to waste my time on petty signs of goodwill between us and instead I'm giving a paltry but just big enough to look good, amount of money to a charity that you may have no interest in but I have chosen as worthy".

So it ended. I decided to still give the money to a charity but not to announce which one and to bite the bullet, go buy some Tesco value Christmas cards (proceeds to charity obviously) and quit whining. Of course since, as you may have guessed this whole process has gone on while I was writing this post I'm now screwed for how to end this post. Shit - youtube video it will have to be! Merry Christmas!