I had a Cynical, Smart-A$$ remark lined up for this thread, but instead, I'll tell you about my day.
In the black humor of the firehouse, we often count the "shooting days" rather than the "shopping days" 'til Christmas. This evening my crew and a medic unit crew did CPR on a 45yo woman. She had a history of alcohol and drug abuse. Turns out her "boyfriend" has been raping her for several weeks by taking advantage of her after she had passed out. She found out about it from her roommate this morning. Tonight she literally partied herself to death. Someone finally noticed that not only was she passed out, but she had stopped breathing. Fortunately for us and her, someone removed this woman's 13yo daughter from the room as we arrived. The roommate is carrying a huge load of guilt for not doing anything to stop the abuse before.
OK, so now the whole crew is pretty much depressed. BUT - all day they have been looking forward to visiting our "Christmas Family." Every year each fire station adopts a family with kids whose circumstances restrict their ability to provide much of a celebration. This year one of the Engineers I work with has a mom who works in some sort of church outreach program. She somehow came in contact with a young mom who had recently escaped a physically abusive husband. The kids are a 3yo boy and 7yo girl. Our union pitches in $100 and the rest is up to us. We took up a collection from everyone who works at the station, got a local grocery store to donate a $25 gift card. An indoor water park donated 3 entry passes. Individuals in the station went out and bought toys and a bunch of grocery staples. A guy from another station had just bought a bunch of new dishes, so gave the old ones (which were quite nice) to our station. Turns out this family had about 3 plates, ate cereal from tupperware and recycled paper cups for drinks. We made a pretty decent set of matching dishes from the donated stuff. We got the Battalion Chief to bring by some plastic fire helmets. The guys had a blast wrapping the stuff between runs today.
At 9pm, we piled everything onto the heavy rescue truck, put the water tender out of service so the engineer could come with us and piled in. The kids were absolutely thrilled and mom was overwhelmed to the point of tears. She commented that she works so hard, but still doesn't even make enough money to pay the rent some months, so doing extra for Christmas was not an option. We let the kids each open one gift - they each randomly picked the one toy each had said they wanted! We sang "We Wish You A Merry Christmas," bundled the kids up and let them climb in the truck for a few minutes. Hugs all around and more tears from mom.
Even an ol' Cynic like me felt good about that, so maybe - just maybe - I was able to make one person's world better tonight...um....I mean last night.
