Editor’s Note: Hope Mongers

Gloom and doom. Gloom and doom. Ho … ho … ho. Gloom and doom.

What an odd time of year — especially this year. As of this writing, Halloween has just passed and the pumpkins aren’t even soggy on the bottoms yet. But stores already are putting out their Christmas stock. And at least one Philadelphia radio station is playing continuous holiday music. Continuous. 24/7.

What of Thanksgiving? Three weeks out and you’re lucky to find a dusty, anemic selection of cards commemorating this humble holiday of gratitude shoved unceremoniously into the far left-hand side of the shelves, pushed aside by the glittery green-and-red onslaught of Christmas greetings.

Yesterday while I was grocery shopping, with a jumble of coupons leaving a trail of cents-off offers behind me as I compared unit prices, a voice came over the loudspeaker announcing that the store “has Wii consoles!”

“Get a head start on the holidays, folks, and get your Wii while we have them!”

Wiis sell for — what? — 500 bucks? If I hadn’t already invested a pretty fair amount of time in the shopping trip, I might have walked out in protest with a resounding harummpppfff, leaving my basket full of store brands and generic equivalents right there in the aisle.

Unfortunately, it’s nothing new. In a few years, we’ll be seeing Christmas tree skirts stocked alongside swimsuit cover-ups in June. Oh, wait … you can’t buy swimsuits in June. By then, the fall clothes are out. Swimsuits you get in February. It’s chaos, really.

But the rush to Christmas seems even more out of joint this year because the economy is so bad. People are losing their homes left and right, having to choose between food and medicine, and still reeling from sky-high gas prices — yet marketing America insists that we start thinking about a severely bastardized and over-the-top holiday that’s two months away. Makes no sense.

Or does it? I’ve been accused of seeing the world through rose-colored, sequin-encrusted glasses connected to a purple feather lanyard, and even I know that the holiday push is strictly profit-fueled. But maybe we’re so quick to embrace it because what we actually are embracing — whether we know it or not — is the sense of hope, happiness, peace, love and joy that the holidays manage to bring, no matter how hectic, how commercial or how insane they get. At least that’s what I’m going to tell myself, mainly so I can avoid strangling some premature and unsuspecting holiday well-wisher with a candy cane and a length of garland.

Hope. It’s a good thing. And that, of course, is where you come in. As fundraisers, you partner with your program folks to feed children, save animals, protect the environment, bring beauty and culture to the masses, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Different missions, different messages, different methods … but still, underneath it all, the same. You breed hope. You plant its seeds in the most hopeless of times, in the most hopeless of places and under the most hopeless of conditions. Thanks to you, it seems almost ridiculous to even use the word “hopeless,” because you perform miracles.

My unwavering respect for nonprofit folks — especially fundraisers — is no secret to the readers of this magazine. And though other issues might take precedence when I write this column 11 months out of the year, there’s nothing more appropriate to write about for the December issue, as the world readies itself for the most hope-filled season of all — whether, for you personally, it be Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or Yule. And since I’m writing this in early November, I’ll tip my hat to Thanksgiving and say to you all … thank you. For your continued readership and advertising support of FundRaising Success, of course, but more importantly for the difference you make in the world, every day, just by doing what you do. Keep up the good work, you merry band of hope mongers. What you do matters, and we’re all the better for it.

Margaret Battistelli
Editor-in-Chief
mbattistelli@napco.com