Why being kind to people shouldn't just be for Christmas - Christa Ackroyd

I love the stories of giving that have woven in and out of my life, some from the past but many from the present. High on the North York Moors is a cross.

I stop and look at it every time I drive out of the dale and towards Whitby. The cross was part of my childhood.

It still evokes memories that make me smile, but also brings a tear to my eye whenever I drive that inhospitable road across the windswept moors, too high for trees to grow and unchanged since the glaciers carved its valleys from the ice.

In our old rattling green Morris Minor with its red wheels and red radiator (who knew my safe and steady father had a daring side to him) we would stop beside the cross at least twice a year on our way to the seaside. Ralph’s Cross was also known locally as travellers cross.

The tradition, dating back to the destruction of the monasteries in Cromwell’s time, was to provide safe passage for those making the Pilgrimage from Whitby Abbey to York Minster.

Beside that cross wealthy travellers would stop their horses and carriages and ask the coachmen to clamber up to the top and place coins in the little groove that the natural stone had created.

If you needed food or lodgings those coins would buy you them, and I suspect the givers also believed they would buy them a place in heaven too.

I will have to check, but the last time I did, there indeed was money placed there. No longer gold sovereigns of course.

But I cannot tell you the joy of being lifted high by my father to place a few pennies from his pocket on top of that cross and take down what was there, my father always insisting we gave it to charity. It was a lesson well taught and never forgotten.

And then he would recount a tale I never get tired of hearing of the many crosses that marked the way still dotted among the heather.

But none as special as Ralph’s Cross. It was, in its purest form, giving to strangers in danger as they trudged the moors to praise their maker.

So too undiscovered stories of charity when I was researching the Brontës for what for me must be the highlight of the year to welcome the Queen to open the Brontë birthplace in Thornton saved for the nation and now celebrated as the humble beginnings of greatness.

Who would have thought when I penned the phrase Be More Brontë to encourage the same resolute determination in young people that three budding writers had shown that Camilla would be the first person to write those words within it’s walls?

Giving from others bought it for future generations but also brought stories of giving during the Brontë sisters lifetimes to the fore.

For example, did you know that the ruined farmhouse at Top Withins that inspired Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights was actually a part of charitable giving in its own right even before the three sisters and their brother roamed the moors?

Money from it’s rent fed and clothed poor children. And now in modern day it forms the centre piece for Wuthering Heights day when charities benefit from the recreation of Kate Bush’s famous dance on the birthday she shares with Emily Brontë and is celebrated each year on July 30th.

Add to that the fact that Patrick’s Brontë’s first major curacy at St Peter’s Church in Hartshead, just a few days before Christmas, handed out thick wooden fabric to the women to sew warm clothes for their children particularly during the luddite uprisings when cottage weavers were losing their homes and their livelihood and you will see why charity was a centre piece of giving as much then as now.

And then last week I learned of another quiet, understated charitable foundation set up several generations ago which directly benefits people today.

There are hundreds and hundreds of charities who never shout, they just do. In the little village of Addingham between Ilkley and Skipton where I have made my home an invitation popped through my door.

Would I, as a woman of over 60 (men were to be over 65 .. no WASPI fight here) like to come and collect my voucher from the Clarke Foley Foundation.

Apparently it happens every year and I had never heard of it. I didn’t by the way as I would rather it went to someone who needs it. But it is a lovely story new to me which I now tell.

James Clarke and his sister Sarah Foley were born in Addingham in the late 1800s, the children of Irish immigrants who came to West Yorkshire.

Daringly for the time the brother and his a sister emigrated to America, to New York specifically, where they made their fortune renovating the slums of Manhattan to improve living conditions for those who were as poor as they once were.

But they never forgot the kindness shown to their family by the people of West Yorkshire. The foundation not only hands out the vouchers at Christmas but supports a number of projects in nearby Ilkley and surrounding areas, quietly without fuss their altruism lives on.

And then there is my beloved Homeless Street Angels supporting not just those on the streets with warm food and clothing, sleeping bags and blankets but this year took the leap of faith to purchase, at personal risk to themselves, a purpose built building which acts as an advice hub and safe space for those transitioning from sleeping rough, those who have been there and those who fear they may end up there.

One thousand families are on their food bank list. Two hundred people are fed and cared for every Thursday evening on the streets of Leeds.

Twins Becky and Shelley Joyce do this in memory of their beautiful sister Abi who died, with the mantra that they couldn’t save her but they can save others.

But because there are so many good people out there it is not only surviving but thriving offering cookery classes, art, creative writing, fitness and more importantly somewhere to sit down with those in trouble and try and work out their lives together.

So you see Christmas is not and never was about how fat your goose is. It is not about the presents under the Christmas tree. Nor how much you have.

It is about sharing what we can with those for whom our tough days would seem like paradise.

A smile, the checking in of an elderly neighbour, a friendly ‘how can I help’ to someone sleeping in a doorway. Any act of kindness.

As Ebenezer Scrooge found out, it is about giving what you can freely and with an open heart to someone who just needs to hear the Christmas message and that is that someone somewhere sees them.

And cares.