EDITORIAL: When chips are down, CFA is up

From most financial perspectives, the last three holiday seasons haven’t exactly been cheerful.

In 2020, for example, we were up to our noses in the COVID-19 pandemic. Oh, and a presidential election went down with no shortage of concern about the nation’s economic outlook.

In 2021, the pandemic hadn’t completely loosened its grip. And last holiday season — it’s OK to wince when you recollect it — inflation felt like it might just eat us all alive. After it had finished off our bank accounts, anyway.

So, the annual Press Christmas for All campaign posted its three worst fundraising years, right?

Ho, ho, ho, you couldn’t be more off base if you used egg nog to wrap Christmas presents.

Jolly fact: The pandemic-riddled holiday season of 2020 ended up being the best in the history of what was then three and a half decades of Press Christmas for All campaigns. Donors stuffed the program’s stocking with $301,650. That crushed the previous record — $238,105 in 2011 — like an avalanche on an anthill.

Over the past three exceedingly difficult years, the program that benefits Kootenai County residents who are working hard to provide for their families and themselves still managed to raise $717,761 — almost three quarters of a million bucks.

Which brings us to now. As the saying goes, folks, we’ve done it before and we can do it again.

Even though inflation is on the decline, most of us have tested the elasticity of our budgets about as far as it’ll go. That means most of us aren’t exactly rolling in the dough, and we don’t mean the Christmas cookie kind. And yet …

… and yet there are so many among us — our neighbors, when you get right down to it — who are struggling more than we are. Some of them are working two jobs that hardly put enough food on the table and keep the car in shape to pick up kids from school or deliver adults to and from work. All they ask is a hand up, and that’s exactly the hand you’ll find at the end of Press Christmas for All’s sleeve.

Your gifts to CFA will not be forgotten Dec. 26. In some cases, they will last generations, reversing the decline of poverty among county residents who simply needed a little momentum powered by love to change that trajectory for the better.

Let’s make this the most wonderful time of the year for our entire Kootenai County family, shall we?