Merry Christmas, Mary Alice! I'm glad that people came through for you. It's wonderful that Alex was taken care of and even more that the people you work with appreciate you and everything you do to help them. And it is real - they do. You are a wonderful person and anyone who makes the effort to get to know you can see that.

I live in a neighborhood where the people around us have nicer houses and are generally better off than us. We get by, but don't have all the extras that a lot of them do. Every year someone has been dropping off presents during the week or so before Christmas - usually a lot more than we manage to get for our kids ourselves. One way to look at it is that Santa really does visit us, and there are generous people out there, but it also makes me feel inadequate, and wonder what they really think of us that they think we can't even provide enough for our kids for Christmas. There's no way that we could compete with all the stuff that they bring, and we honestly don't even have a place to put it all in the house. But I guess looking at it that way is not a good attitude. It's better to be glad that people are so kind and generous, and to make more of an effort to give whatever we can to others who could use it, even if what we have to give is our time or something else non-material. That counts too.

Wendy

<font color=green>"Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible" Carl Jung</font color=green>