I was grocery shopping the other day and one of my stops was at Aldi. I don’t usually get too many items there, but I do check for fruit on sale, Caesar dressing, tortilla chips, milk, eggs, and dishwasher detergent. Grapes were $1.59 a pound. Not bad, but I’ve seen better. In fact, they were $.99 a pound at Festival this week when I checked, but theirs had no snap to them. I refuse to buy grapes without snap. They tend to sit in the refrigerator until I am forced to throw them away. Apparently, no one in my family likes grapes without snap either. Aldi is the only store where I need to purchase items with cash. I checked before entering. I only had $10 in cash, not including the $.25 for a cart. I can usually estimate my purchase pretty well, but since I didn’t know exactly how many pounds of grapes I had in my basket, I wasn’t sure if I was under $10 when I went to the checkout line. I told the cashier that I wouldn’t buy the loaf of bread if I went over $10. Sure enough, I ended up with a grocery total of $10.36. I would need to go without the whole wheat bread (somehow better than bleached white bread, I’m told), or would I? I received the change back from the cashier and began heading out the door.

I do suppose that I had a homeless looking quality to me at the time. I was wearing my 25-year- old Lancer baseball jacket with pocket stuffing hanging out and some non-descript wrinkled sweatpants that may be a bit short in the legs. Come to think of it, I was unshaven and had a baseball cap that had lost all of its strength to stand up. I think I only had one glove because I don’t know where the other one is. I may have even had an expression on my face that falsely conveyed a concern over where my next meal would come from because I was hungry at the time. So it shouldn’t have been a total surprise when a friendly tap on the shoulder came from a smiling young lady who said, “Here is the bread you wanted to buy. Merry Christmas!”

I was a bit stunned because that has never happened to me before. The wheels in my head started spinning. What should I say? Should I tell the woman that I really wasn’t that hard up and I was heading to Festival next to spend money with my credit card. I could have explained about the grapes and how the ones at Festival didn’t have snap. But instead, I smiled back and said, “Thank you! Merry Christmas to you too.” I didn’t want to take away the joy she had in the giving. 

Give of yourself this Christmas as you reflect on everything that was given to you on that first Christmas.