Can you give the gift of dignity this Christmas?
Our goal is to help parents in the Ciudad Nueva community provide for their own families and take ownership over their Christmas giving!
Why does Ciudad Nueva create a Christmas store instead of just giving gifts directly to families?
Our goal is for parents to feel empowered rather than ashamed, and to have the opportunity to take pride in buying their children’s presents themselves. The following is an excerpt called CHRISTMAS AGAIN, from the book Theirs is the Kingdom, by Robert Lupton:
And if their home is blessed again this year with a visit from a Christian family bearing food and beautifully wrapped presents for the kids, he will stay in the bedroom until they are gone. He will leave the smiling and the graciousness to his wife. His joy for the children will be genuine. But so is the heavy ache in his stomach as his image of himself as a provider is dealt another blow. Christmas. That wonderful, awful time when giving hearts glow warm and bright while fading embers of a poor man’s pride are doused black.”
We, too, have seen fathers disappear from their own homes when gifts have arrived, and so we have created the Ciudad Nueva Christmas Store as one of the ways we empower families in our Ciudad Nueva community. We are
happy to report that for the last four years, fathers and mothers in our neighborhood come together to purchase gifts for their children, and leave with smiles knowing they purchased the gifts to bring home to their children.
Ciudad Nueva invites you to consider donating items to our Christmas Store this holiday season.
Here’s How the Store Works
Your donated gifts are used in the following ways:
KIDS – purchase gifts for their parents and families by using the “bucks” that they have earned through participation in events, completing homework, improving grades, being helpful and kind.
PARENTS – purchase gifts at about 15-20% of retail cost. Parents then have the joy of selecting, purchasing and giving gifts to their own children, without the loss of dignity that can accompany having their kids receive gifts from a stranger that might be nicer than they can provide themselves.
