A Dark and Silent Night

“It was a dark and stormy night.” These classic words, used by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in his 19^th century novel Paul Clifford, are often called the worst opening lines of literature. He obviously hadn’t read novelist Elmore Leonard’s ten rules for good writing, as rule number one is direct: “Never open a book with weather.”

Yet how else can I say it? It was a dark and silent night as we left Jake’s Steakhouse with a full belly, happy and satisfied. Silent, that is, until I paused to listen to the echo on the wind. What’s that faint disturbance in the air? As my palms began to sweat, my ears recognized the clang of the Salvation Army kettle bell, wafting across the expanse of parking lot and street from its position outside of Buehlers Food Market. The Salvation Army’s Christmas Kettle Campaign has begun!

The notes of those bells have been a familiar companion to me for longer than I want to admit. Mention the now defunct Twin Fair Discount Department Store in the Buffalo, New York area, and my body shivers in its memory of the frigid nights ringing that bell as a teenager. Grand Central Station in mid-town Manhattan was a daily assignment in the late 70’s, an eye-opening exposé of life in the Big Apple for a New Yorker from the other end of the state. I’ve rung that blasted (oh, I mean blessed) bell in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and its notes have even invaded my dreams from time to time.

Drama aside, the Salvation Army bell has been an effective fund-raising tool since 1891, when Captain Joseph McFee placed an empty kettle at the Oakland Ferry Landing with a sign reading, “Keep the Pot Boiling.” His goal was to collect funds for Christmas dinner for the poor of San Francisco. More than one hundred years later, donations to the Red Kettle Campaign provide up to 20% of the local unit’s annual operating budget in some locations, supporting low-income families long after the Christmas stockings are packed away.

Over my more than forty years of Salvation Army involvement, I’ve heard the prediction of the demise of the Christmas kettle time and again. When some malls banned the ringing bell, creative workers resorted to flipping a hand sign, “ding, dong,” while others used puppets and ventriloquist dummies to capture the attention of potential donors. Keeping with the changing times, the Salvation Army has experimented with kettles that accept credit cards or display the QR code, and offers an online Red Kettle experience minus the annoying bell and glacial temperatures for the less intrepid among us.

Like other charities, the Salvation Army also uses the mail to request donations. My ninety year old mother has gotten on more than forty of those charitable mailing lists, including the Cold War Patriots, the Smile Train, and Cal Farley’s – all worthy causes to someone, but often overwhelming to a generation who feels obligated to give when asked. I’ve spent about five hours visiting websites this week, requesting her name be removed from their mailings, definitely a more difficult task than making a donation in her name.

I’ve sat at most of the chairs around the charitable giving table, strategizing fund-raising ideas, supporting United Way, counting the coins dropped into the kettle, writing a personal check to a cause I support, evaluating grant requests, and worrying long into the night when the pot is empty. I long for the day when charitable fund-raising is unnecessary because our neighbors no longer need the services of the Salvation Army and other agencies of our community, but that day hasn’t come, and so the bell rings on with its plaintive call: “remember the poor.”

Just as I’ve had to consign my typewriter and eight-track player to the dustbin, the day may come when the Salvation Army bell is heard no more at shopping locations across our country, remembered only as a nostalgic symbol of Christmas past. Other fund-raising gimmicks (oh, I mean tools) will be explored, and the work of charity will continue, but for me, if or when that call to remember is silenced, it will indeed be “a dark and silent night.”