The Spirit of the Season

By Scott R. Cooper, Crook County Judge
Published in the Central Oregonian, December 2005

The Need For Christmas Spirit Doesn't End December 31

For as long as I can remember, Crook County has taken time each holiday season to remember the less fortunate. This is the time of the year when the local food bank reports that its shelves, depleted in the fall, fill again. Names fly off community Christmas trees in the lobbies of public and semi-public buildings. Businesses, governments, churches, non-profits and individuals offer their own gifts of holiday cheer with brightly decorated lawns and storefronts.

Children are clothed, adults are fed, shut-ins receive visitors and for a season, the world is a brighter place. What’s not to love about Christmas, especially in our part of the world?

Interestingly, I can’t remember a time when we in this community didn’t mark the season with an extraordinary outpouring of generosity. I’ve often wondered what it is that makes this such a giving place.

One possibility is that many of our residents have at one time or another known hard times themselves. People who themselves have wondered where money for Christmas gifts will come from or how they will put a Christmas dinner on the table tend to have more empathy for those in a similar predicament.

And we’ve been there. After all, it wasn’t more than a few decades ago that residents much of Prineville knew all too well what it was to live with the boom and bust cycle of the timber industry which dominated the local economy. The fat wallet of one Christmas might well be followed by a leaner paycheck just a year later.

But even the vagaries of the life in the mills paled compared to the destitution an earlier generation felt. That group, who came to Prineville in significant numbers, was fleeing the twin scourge of the Dustbowl and the Depressions. Many of them literally arrived with nothing more than the possessions they could carry.

The world they came to was no stranger to hardship either. The pioneering families who came here from the mid 19th Century onward learned quickly what it meant to try to scrape a living by farming and ranching the desert and sagebrush plains. More than one of those hardy individuals spent many a cold winter wondering whether supplies laid in during summer’s heat would carry the family through winter.

Perhaps the memory of those struggles etched all too vividly in the minds of this community’s members what it means to struggle economically and to wonder where the next meal will come from. When people have experienced tough times themselves, they’re less likely to appreciate the struggles of others.

So it has always been in Prineville, and each holiday seems to be marked by an even more impressive outpouring of generosity, this year being no exception.

What I wonder is whether we can sustain this kind of spirit in years to come.

By all accounts, things are getting better around here. I covered in this space last month the amazing economic success this community is experiencing in the form of record low unemployment, rising property values and substantial growth in bank deposits. But that’s only part of the story. Social data also are showing change.

To its credit, Oregon shed its title of “hungriest” state in the nation last year, falling from first to eleventh-ranked among the 50 states. Crook County wasn’t immune to that trend as the percentage of families in our county receiving food stamps fell. Also on the decline was the percentage of households in Crook County living below the poverty level, while educational attainment continues to show improvement. Even some of our risk factors for children--low birthweights, in utero exposure to alcohol and tobacco, abuse and neglect statistics--are on the decline.

There is no doubt that some of this statistical change is attributable to a lot of good work by committed community members and public servants. An equally amount is attributable simply to the mathematics of in-migration of an older, more affluent, better educated population which “dilutes” the pool of individuals who are struggles, causing percentages to fall even while real numbers increase in some cases.

However you want to look at it, the problems of hunger, illness (physical and mental), underemployment, lack of shelter and even homelessness haven’t gone away completely and aren’t likely to do so soon. That’s why fostering the spirit of giving continues to be so important—not just at Christmas but every day of the year.

We have to be continually on guard. A rising tide doesn’t always lift all boats. Sometimes in the excitement, we simply to notice the boats which quietly slip unnoticed below the waves.

It’s all our jobs to make sure that doesn’t happen.

The Christmas season has always been the high point of this community’s engagement with the underprivileged and this year is no exception. Reports are that names are flying off the community tree. Donations are up. The Commission on Children and Families reports the most coordinated Christmas Campaign yet.

We can deservedly pat ourselves the back. Once again, we seem to have managed to keep at least some portion of Christmas focused on values other than making cash registers ring and maximizing the days off work. But the hard work is still ahead of us when the euphoria of the season fades, because poverty is a 365-day-a-year, 24/7 kind of thing, and it never, never takes a holiday .

We don’t have to pack up the Spirit of Christmas like a holiday decoration. In a perfect world, would proudly display it all year round. It’s a choice we make, and whether and how we make it defines the kind of community we are not just at Christmas, but the rest of the year as well.