Three years ago, I declared to my five children, “There will be no gifts for Christmas this year.”
“But why, Mom? I already promised my friends I’d join the Secret Santa!” my eldest daughter, then a fifth grader, protested immediately.
I felt my face flush. I wanted to tell her that gift giving has nothing to do with Jesus’ birth and that we should feel sorrowful and maybe even guilty about indulging in excessive consumerism when people in Ukraine, Israel, and Palestine were undergoing immense suffering.
“There are terrible things happening in the world right now,” I replied. “Many children are having a hard time. Some have lost their parents. Some don’t have enough food. Getting gifts for ourselves at a time like this isn’t the right thing to do.”
“Okay, I guess that makes sense,” said my usually quiet second son, then a second grader—though not very enthusiastically.
“But how will we celebrate Christmas then, Mommy?” my kindergartner daughter asked, a deep frown forming between her eyes.
Her question caught me off-guard. As I searched for an adequate answer, my two toddler boys ran off with their Paw Patrol toys, blissfully unaware of what my earlier declaration meant for the holiday season. I resorted to a tried-and-true response: “We will pray, and Jesus will give us wisdom.”
Don’t get me wrong; I am not against giving and receiving Christmas presents. But our giftless Christmas became a kind of Sabbath for our family, a quiet pause during the holiday busyness. By choosing to give gifts to people in need instead, we practiced selfless generosity to remember the God who gave his own Son—his saving presence, Immanuel—as humanity’s greatest gift (John 3:16; Matt.1:21–23).
I did not know what Christmas really meant as a child growing up in the southwestern province of Jeollabukdo, Korea, in the 1990s. December 25 was a rather unremarkable day for most Koreans at the time. Traditional Korean holidays like Seollal, the Lunar New Year, and Chuseok, the mid-autumn festival, were far more significant, as people would travel to their hometowns to see their extended families and feast for several days.
Christmas was only a one-day holiday, so my family did not travel to see our extended family in Seoul. On Christmas Eve, I would act in a Nativity play or sing carols at church, but I always felt out of place as the only kid with a Seoul accent. On Christmas Day, I usually had nothing else to do but to stay home and watch American Christmas movies on TV with my two younger sisters. I quietly envied how the children in these films often discovered lavish gifts under the Christmas tree, whether from Santa Claus or their parents.
At the time, I never asked my parents for a gift. We also never had a Christmas tree—real or fake—in our tiny rental apartment. Deep inside, I longed to have one even though I knew my parents had far too many worries to care about these foreign traditions. They simply could not afford to do much, as my father’s business was on the verge of collapse.
One Christmas after I turned 14, however, my family received an unexpected present from someone who taught me what real gift giving is about.
As I returned home from school a few days before the holiday, I met our pastor at our apartment door, looking like a real-life Santa Claus with a large sack on his shoulder. “Don’t tell anyone I was here,” Pastor Chae whispered to me.
By the time my mother ran out to thank him, he was gone. All that remained was a hundred-pound bag of rice—enough to feed our family for a month. “Oh, pastor … how did he know? We’ve just finished our last cup of rice,” my mother said in a trembling voice.
Pastor Chae’s gift to my family may have seemed mundane, but it met our most urgent need. My mother had never shared our dire financial situation with him, but he knew what we needed because he had been watching us with an aching, prayerful heart.
In all the gifts our pastor gave, he expected nothing in return—not even a word of thanks. My mother later told me that this was not the only secret gift he had given us. Once, at church, my younger sisters prayed to have bicycles they could ride. A few weeks later, there they were in front of our apartment door.
My intention in declaring a no-gift Christmas was to teach our children what it felt like to be in need. But banning gifts at Christmas without finding another way to celebrate could make the holiday feel barren, as if we were stripping away its joy.
As I prayed for ideas to make our gift-free Christmas meaningful and fulfilling, the Holy Spirit reminded me of a Bible verse: “Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same” (Luke 3:11). Christ taught us that we must love our neighbors in tangible, heartfelt ways—just as Pastor Chae did for our family. As an act of obedience to Christ, perhaps we could turn away from overindulging our desires and turn toward helping people whose needs were greater than our own.
That Christmas Eve, we gathered in our living room and watched a few carefully selected clips from the wars in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine. Although these videos did not display many violent scenes, we all felt the weight of the people’s suffering there. Tears welled up in my daughters’ eyes. My oldest son covered his mouth with his hands, while my two toddlers’ faces grew serious as their eyes stayed fixed on the screen.
Then, we read the Christmas story from Matthew 1 together. We talked about what Jesus’s birth truly meant: that he came to give his very life to save all of humanity, including people living through the horrors of war. My husband and I prayed. The three older children followed. I guided the two toddler boys to repeat a simple prayer after me: “Dear God, thank you for showing me these children. Jesus, be with them. Jesus, help them. In Jesus’s name, amen.”
With the resources we saved by foregoing gifts for each other, we looked for ways to provide tangible help to someone around my children’s age. Through a Christian humanitarian aid organization’s website, we came across Darvin from El Salvador. Darvin shared the same birthday as our oldest son, although he was two years younger. He lived on a small farm with his grandmother and some chickens. He loved playing soccer and dreamed of one day traveling to Africa.
Together, we decided to send Darvin a monthly gift of $43 for as long as he needed support. This amount would help Darvin attend school and receive health care. Despite our seemingly modest giving, I hoped he might experience the same God-given wonder my mother and I felt when our pastor surprised us with a bag of rice all those Christmases ago.
For the next two years, we reverted to the usual Christmas customs. We held a small-scale gift exchange with my sister’s family and let the children join Secret Santa exchanges at school. But this year, I’m thinking of bringing back our gift-free tradition.
“Do you want to do a no-gifts Christmas again this year so we can send something special to Darvin? Could we even start helping another child?” I asked my children recently. To my surprise, all of them—including my youngest sons, now six and four—nodded eagerly.
The next day, one of my daughters shared with her third-grade classmates that our family would not be exchanging gifts this year. “Why not?” her teacher asked in surprise.
“Because there are children who don’t have any gifts,” she replied. “And we can share ours with them instead.”
Ahrum Yoo is a PhD student in Old Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary.
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