An Asif Zamir Christmas

Best Christmas ever. No, I didn’t get any ‘presents’ like you’d think. I didn’t have a tree or decorations or even Christmas dinner. I rarely ever do. I just don’t care about those things.

Yesterday, aka Christmas day of 2008 I woke up, drank my coffee, prepped my schedule and went out to do my Christmas day prayers. It took me about an hour to pack up all the gifts my friends, family and church donated, about 200+ fantastic gifts in all. Clothing, books, personal items, toys, stuffed animals, nic nacs, video games, board games, you name it, really nice stuff.

I drove to David’s house first. I haven’t had a conversation with David in over 6 months. Time flies by and we haven’t had those Wednesday night bible studies like we used to. We drove up and picked up Ryan, who had even more presents, even though we didn’t have the room to hold them. Finally we picked up Kendra and went to the church. You should have seen the car, I should have taken a picture. We all had presents piled on us and around us, even around our feet. If you were just passing by you wouldn’t know there were people in the car, just beautifully wrapped presents.

We had some good conversations in the car. Kendra was thankful that she still lives with her parents, things are well for her. She’s job hunting for an office job and I told her that it would be in her best interests to hit the library and start reading up about business, office work, administrative assistant type work. Ryan is looking for an apartment because where he lives right now is dampening his spirit.

We left for downtown around 7pm, and got to the Covenant House around 7:45pm. We spent time there with the staff members chatting with them and finding out about what we can do in the future. One suggestion was we could perform a church service for their 100 youths (not that they can promise that anyone would show up). I think it’s a great idea and I’ve begun to pray about it. Taking the church service right to the people, instead of expecting the people to show up, I like this idea. The staffs eyes lit up and they told us how their care closet was empty (they showed it to us, it was really empty) and because of that some of their youths would go without this Christmas – but not anymore. Nothing brings me more joy than to do something like this every Christmas.

Around 8:30 we left to go park in our ‘normal’ spot. We walked around the square and stopped at Timothy’s coffee house to get some beverages and to warm up. We walked back to the car and then met another church group and started our trek to minister to the homeless at Toronto City Hall. Richard was our only regular homeless friend that night, we didn’t see Billy or Cubby or anyone else. We saw new people though. Richard (who has no legs and lives on his wheelchair in the brutal cold) told us how a family picked him up and he had Christmas at their house. He showed us the presents he received from them including a portable dvd player.

I drove everyone home, and then I drove home, actually, first I drove around town for about an hour, got some pizza even. I turned off my stereo because I was happy about the best Christmas ever.

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