The Most Generous Gift

At this time of year, when so much energy is spent on buying presents, I always remember the most generous gift I ever saw.

I was working for the Assembly of First Nations in Ottawa, and living in an apartment building in the east end of Sandy Hill district. During my ten-block walk to work each morning, I often recognized some familiar faces among the street people who gratefully accepted whatever donations passersby could offer.

I got to know those who were genuinely in need of the generosity of others, not the pretenders just masquerading for some extra cash. I always stopped and spoke to anyone to whom I gave money; they seemed to appreciate the conversation as much as whatever loose change I could spare.

Most of what they were offered came in the form of coinage, including pennies -- then still legal tender -- which were regarded by many of us as pieces of metal that had little material value and added unwanted weight to our trouser pockets.

A few days before my first Christmas in Ottawa, an AFN colleague asked me to join them to attend a unique ceremony in the city's trendy downtown Byward Market, just a few blocks away.

It was an annual event, I was told, involving some of the street people I recognized from my morning walks to work.

As a collective, they had saved all the pennies that had been included in handouts during the previous year -- 40,000 of them, weighing over 200 pounds -- and placed them in several sturdy cloth bags.

Then this "ragged company," as the late Anishinaabe writer Richard Wagamese would likely describe them, presented their accumulated $400 donation to an Ottawa children's charity.

That gift -- from a group of people, many of whom did not know where their next meal was coming from or where they were going to sleep that night -- was by far the most generous I have ever seen.

-M.S.