Kindness matters.

I just bought this on Ebay.

It reminds me of one of my most treasured and painful gifts I got for my first Christmas at school. This was 60s England and there weren’t a lot of kids of colour at our school yet. I was 5 years old, excited at the idea of having Christmas lunch instead of usual school dinners (all meals were called dinner back then). There were even whisperings of Santa coming too.

With Presents!!!

I could barely contain myself.

And arrive he did, carrying the largest sack of presents I’d ever seen.

Several times, he walked past me to give other kids their presents. And each time he did my heart sank a little.

Until I was the only kid left, at which point he gave me a small matchbox Austin 1100. A present that represented both joy and pain.

Joy, in that it was a toy car; I loved toy cars.

Pain, in that I was the very last person to receive a present, so it reminded me that I was somehow outside of the rest of “them”.

Decades later, at my first Christmas at Wieden and Kennedy, David Kennedy was dressed as Santa, distributing presents to a group of local under-served kids. I was watching one small African American boy of 5 or 6 waiting to get a present from Santa, but David passed him a couple of times to give less shy kids their presents. Each time he did the little boy became a little more crestfallen. His little head was bowed and he seemed to have given up.

My heart was breaking for him, but unlike my story, David noticed and immediately made a bee line for him. He took the boy aside and took out a present from deep inside his sack (that sounded wrong) which he gave him along with the biggest Santa hug. I was just trying not to cry because it was so beautiful.

From then on, David epitomized kindness for me. And the fact that he was dressed as Santa didn’t hurt either.

I wonder what happened to that boy?