Jesus Banks

If you have been reading our blog for awhile you may be aware of our Christmas tradition involving the girls Jesus Banks (if not you can read this post).  Yesterday we sat down to ask the girls what they wanted to spend their Jesus money on.  At their young ages we do give them about three choices, but aside from that we do not influence them in any way.  They both chose to do Operation Christmas Child.  If you are not familiar with them, you can watch this video.  The girls decided they would do two children (so two shoe boxes).  They chose to do one boy and one girl, both in the ages 2-4 category.  So I took the Genius out shopping.  To me, this is the best part.  They take their Jesus bank into the store(s) that we go to.  So, we load up the cart with items she selected.   Again, we try to not offer too much input.  She was so smart with her choices.  She chose plain white socks, an 8 pack, so that each child could have 4 pairs.  She picked some marbles, toy cars, hair clips and many other items.  She lugged her stuff up to the counter and the total was rung up.  I painstakingly counted out all her pennies and dimes and other money.  She was $1.83 short.  Not a big deal, so I pulled out our card to pay for the rest.  An elderly gentleman in line behind us stopped me, pulled out his wallet and paid the $1.83 she owed.  Wow.  Talk about two examples of the true meaning of Christmas and the holidays.  Two little girls reaching out to children on the other side of world and one elderly man showing an unexpected kindness to a little girl.  Absolutely a memory she will never forget.