Saturday, January 12, 2008

The 12 Days of Christmas gone WRONG??

OK, figured it is seriously time to update my blog, since it is long past Christmas Eve! I do have one more lingering holiday issue on my mind though, if you can please bear with me.
Here is my dilemna.....
Our family decided to do "The 12 Days of Christmas" this year for an older single neighbor lady up the street. All we really know about her is that she LOVES animals, I mean, loves them like no one else I have ever seen. She adopts every stray, injured or homeless animal that she hears of, and all the stray neighborhood cats are always lurking around her house because she feeds them well. Many of the neighbors make fun of her, but she has always been very nice when I have talked with her. She has no family that I know of, and so we were excited to do this for her. After all, everyone loves to be a little spoiled for Christmas- right?
So, we carefully picked small gifts that we thought she would like or need and the kids had fun sneaking up to her door each night after dark and leaving the package.
Most of the gifts were just fun things, but a few of them were obviously LDS, as we also hoped that this would be a good missionary experience. On the last night, Christmas Eve, we wrote our testimonies in a Book of Mormon and put our family picture in it. We also put a cute pair of pajamas with that....since that is our family tradition, to get new pj's on Christmas Eve. We were hoping that she would be home because we all went to her door and were going to carol as we delivered the last gift. (my big kids were so excited ! ha ha) Well, she wasn't home and so we left it.
ok, this is the wierd part....she has never said anything about it and has never even made eye contact with any of us since! Please don't get me wrong, we obviously did not do this to get anything in return, but I just think it is so strange that she has never acknowledged it in any way. I feel really awkward about it now and wonder if it all may have offended her. She has always been so sweet to the kids, and even adopted their pet rats that they got for Christmas the year before (the newness wore off real fast! thank goodness!)
Anyway, I don't know what to do now....she may just not know what to say,or she may think we will try to convert her if she thanks us.....I am stressing about it, because we had a friendship starting, and now I feel like our good intentions may have really messed things up.
Do any of you have any thoughts or ideas for me???

6 comments:

Kristen said...

first of all cute blog. secondly, i can't believe you gave her pajamas!! what a nice gift. we did it for an elderly man in our circle and it was a lot of fun for the kids. i am guessing that she was uncomfortable with the BOM thing but I wouldn't worry about it. you never know what kind of seed you planted. i would just give it a few weeks and then have the kids take some cookies over to her or something and act like nothing ever happened. some people are uncomfortable with service being rendered to them. maybe she just doesn't know how to respond.

Tara said...

ya, it has crossed my mind that she may just be uncomfortable with knowing what to say. Maybe she has never had anything really nice done for her before. sad.

Unknown said...

I would agree. She probably doesn't know what to do. Maybe he's just contemplating everything. How fun though. We love to do Secret Santas as a family.

Brenna said...

Shoot! That is hard when you feel like good intentions have gone wrong, but maybe there is still hope. Maybe wait some time and then for FHE one night bake her some cookies and bring them to her and just say hi to her. Maybe she was overwhelmed by all your kindness and doesn't know what to say. K, I just noticed that your first commenter Kristen said the same thing about cookies. LOL

Kristen said...

great minds think alike..isn't she the one who reminds you of me?

Brooke said...

Oh, I'm not very good with things like this. I pretty much just hope that I don't find myself in a similar situation! ha ha. I think its so great that you gave her a Book of Mormon. I thinks that's a scary thing to do. But really, you're in a hard spot. Maybe she just doesn't know how to react. Maybe she can't figure out if she's supposed to owe you something. I would give the same advice as Kristen. I think it sounds great!