英语杂谈：42 Christmas jar

Before my dad died, we never thought about money. I mean, it wasn't that we were rich, but we weren’t poor either, you know, we just were. We had a nice house; we had a hot dinner every night; we even went to Disneyland once and I remember we all got dressed up for the airplane ride. We never really wanted for anything except perhaps for a little more time together.

That’s from the performance you will see live from New York on December 3rd in movie theaters all across the country. You can go to Glennbeck.com for all the details. I want to talk to you about the Christmas Jars Reunion, and author Jason Wright is here. The Christmas jars tradition is what exactly?

Very simple, you take an empty jar, pickle 1 jar or mayonnaise jar, doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how big it is. And you just dedicate 2 your spare change to it each and every day. You don’t need to write a really big check. You don’t need to drop a hundred dollar bill in it; it’s your spare change. That little act of daily sacrifice, every day filling up that jar, eventually accumulates 3 into a pretty tidy sum of money to give away to someone anonymously 4 on Christmas Eve.

Now I do it. We all have one in our house. I have one in my closet 5, it really has a Christmas jar. We filled it up; and then we go and put it on somebody’s doorstep the week of Christmas anonymously. We just , you know, it is great fun for the kids to be able to try to sneak 6 it up to the house and leave it there. If anybody, you haven't started you jar at the beginning of the year. I think people would say, well, OK, that will be a good tradition to start next year.

That’s right. I hear that a lot; and that's not true. Go right now as soon as the program is over. Find a jar, fill it up. Between now and Christmas, what do we got, still four or five weeks? Cheat a little bit if you have to. Go to the bank and get twenty dollars for the quarters. To the right family in need, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty dollars may not seem like a lot of money to you; but to a family who just have been, maybe dad’s been laid off, maybe it’s a single mom with a couple of kids has no idea how she’s gonna to afford to be able to put even one thing under the tree for Christmas, let alone some extravagant 7 kind of Christmas that they don’t need. But one thing with their name on it, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty dollars in a Christmas jar given anonymously to them could change their Christmas, could in fact change their life and they will pay off for it.

America, I’m...Next week I'll share with you a story about the hardest Christmas that I had with my kids was the year I was flat broke, was the year I got my daughter a bell. And actually, I mean, I found myself shopping at CVS, the drugstore, for Christmas. And I was so low. I remember that Christmas. I also remember the Christmas that we did the Christmas jars. That first Christmas we did it, I remember my kids were still small enough where they were just wired. They couldn’t wait. And we got out in the middle of the night; and we parked the car a couple of blocks away. And then we snuck up to the house; the kids ran with the jar. I was afraid that they were gonna drop it; it was gonna break. And then there would be broken glass and then there’d be a lawsuit 8. But that didn’t happen. And I remember so vividly 9 how great it was. Please, begin to start new traditions. This is Christmas Jars Reunion, it is the sequel to The Christmas Jars, you will find it in bookstores everywhere. It is a fantastic book and a fantastic tradition. Jason Wright.

Thank you! If you give a jar away or you get a jar, will you please visit my website and tell me your story. I’d love to hear them , I’d love to share them with other...

The website is...?

Christmasjars.com.

Got it!