Shelter Christmas...Trees

This is actually funny and sad at the same time but I have to tell it. Back on 12/13/11 I made a post titled Reality Check where I discussed having to listen to people bitch and gripe about stupid crap. In that post I talked about the upcoming Christmas and how different it would be for my kids and me from our past Christmases. Well, I was right, it was different. When you’re in a homeless shelter you can’t have holidays like you can when you have your own place.

One of my worries had been that my kids would have very few gifts on Christmas morning. I had no money and I wasn’t sure if their dad was going to send them anything. Well everything was actually great for the kids. Their dad sent two big boxes full of stuff for them; I was able to make a little money to buy them a few things as well as their stocking stuffers; and some friends also bought the kids gifts. They really weren’t lacking for anything despite my fears.

We also didn’t have to spend Christmas sitting in the shelter because a friend of mine, who had lived in the shelter for a few months with two of her kids, invited us over to her place to have dinner with her and her family. That was really nice of her and we all had a great time. But that’s not really what I wanted to tell you about. I wanted to tell you how the people in the PRD corporate office think of their residents.

I mentioned in the 12/13 post that there would be a Christmas tree in the upper common room that the kids would be allowed to decorate. They were so excited because we always decorated our tree together, as a family. They couldn’t wait. They knew there couldn’t be any lights on the tree because lights were considered a fire hazard but they didn’t care. They just wanted to put decorations on it and they couldn’t wait for December 19^th to arrive. That’s when the tree was supposed to be delivered and I was told it would be about eight feet tall. The upper common room had vaulted ceilings so an eight foot tree would look great up there.

Well the 19^th arrived and all the kids in the house went off to school anticipating coming back to the shelter to see the huge Christmas tree. I left to go work with Mark and Ursula for the day. It was business as usual. Then I got back to the shelter before the buses arrived and I finally got a good look at how we poor, homeless people were viewed by the corporate assholes that run PRD.

I walked in the back door as usual and just to my right, in the corner of the lower common room, was a Christmas tree. I actually stopped and did a double take when I saw it. Are you ready for this? The tree was a little over five feet tall; badly squished and misshapen; and it was decorated with silver garland, a few Christmas balls, hand-colored paper decorations that looked like they were made by preschoolers, and a silver star on top. The worst part though was that it was leaning against the wall; not standing, leaning. It had a red rag around the bottom of it that hid – I know because I looked – that base that was supposed to have four prongs but only had three, hence the fact that it couldn’t stand on its own. I was stunned. What the fuck was it doing there?

Marcy happened to be coming down the stairs and saw me staring at the Charlie Brown Christmas tree and we laughed at it. Then she told me there was another one in the upper common room that was just as bad. I had to see it for myself so I went upstairs. She was right. The one upstairs was about the same height as the one downstairs only the upstairs one was decorated with paper garland and had only hand-colored decorations on it, and it didn’t even have as many as the tree that was downstairs. It, too, was leaning against the wall because the three-pronged base had only two prongs. I couldn’t believe it. I was wondering what the kids would think when they got home; I was afraid they were going to be really disappointed.

 

If they were disappointed they didn’t show or voice it. Dolly thought the some of the decorations were cute, and Zach and Ty basically laughed at the trees the way I did. Then they went off to do their homework and that was that. It wasn’t the same for us adults. All the other residents agreed with me. Weren’t we entitled to a new Christmas tree, or at least a tree that didn’t look so raggedy? Just because we were in a shelter for the holidays didn’t mean we didn’t care about the holidays. I even made a joke to everyone, staff included, that the trees looked like someone from maintenance had just picked them up off the side of the street after the previous owners threw them away. Here’s the kicker. I was informed by staff that that’s exactly what had happened.

I can only guess but it seems as if PRD didn’t feel like purchasing a new tree for us that year because we weren’t worthy so we got someone else’s discards. They didn’t even have the decency to take the old decorations off so our kids could decorate them, nor did they fix the bases so they could stand on their own. That was a seriously shitty thing to do. I don’t know if it happened in the other PRD houses or not because, believe it or not, we weren’t supposed to speak to or associate with the residents of the other houses.

The whole thing made me sick to think that, just because we were poor and homeless, we had to spend our holiday being treated to second-hand decorations. I mean, shit, it would have been better to not have any Christmas trees at all than to have the pieces of shit that we got. People in hospitals get better decorations. I know it seems trivial to you but we were all trying to make the best of our situations and having to have our holiday in a shelter; the least the corporate assholes could have done was make the place a little brighter for us. They may not have thought we were worth it, but we all knew we were. Fuck them. May their ignorance and stinginess come back to bite them in their asses.

Until next time…peace to all.