You did it again, you beautiful people, you.
Operation Yuletide reached its goal!
Operation Yuletide, this blog’s 2015 Christmas charity fundraiser, reached its goal of $700 USD. Thanks to donations from a few generous donors, Living Water International can help provide clean water to more impoverished people this year. Once again, you did it, guys. You made this happen. You made the world a better, wetter place.
Thank you. On behalf of every single person whom your donations will help this year, thank you so much.
For Operation Yuletide, I promised rewards to donors. I wanted to use my creative gifts (such as they are) to encourage donations, and especially to thank donors. A few awesome people supported Operation Yuletide, but only one person admitted to it. The other donors remained anonymous.
To you mysterious donors, I say this: Thank you so much, whoever you are. I would love to thank you personally, but I will respect your anonymity if you prefer to remain anonymous. If any of you would like any of the donor rewards for Operation Yuletide, please let me know via social media or TMTF’s Contact page. I owe you those rewards, and if you’re interested, I’m more than happy to provide them!
To the one person who donated openly, the ever kind and supportive JK Riki, I say this: Thank you so much for being generous, supportive, and generally awesome. (To everyone who isn’t JK Riki, I say this: You should check out his his blog on creativity.)
Now that Christmas is over and Operation Yuletide has reached its goal, I suppose I should retire the fundraiser’s mascot, Oswald Grimm the disgraced Christmas elf.
Grimm spent the fundraiser sitting in a corner of my kitchen, muttering to himself and occasionally swigging from a little black bottle in his pocket. He gives me the creeps. As long as I’m on the subject of Grimm, is anyone, um, interested in adopting a Christmas elf? He may not be any good for the Christmas season, but I bet he would be great for Halloween. At any rate, I need to do something to get him out of my kitchen.
Operation Yuletide could have succeeded without Oswald Grimm, but it could never have reached its goal without you wonderful readers. You guys… you did a really good thing. You did something awesome. Thank you for your generosity and compassion! God bless you!
Typewriter Monkey Task Force 
At some point you’re going to have enough random weird stuff happening in your life from your blog that someone ought to make a web comic about it. Typewriter monkeys and disgruntled, drinking Christmas elves are a great start, plus the real-world cat. A few more strange characters show up and who knows…
Congrats on reaching the goal! Of course, now I feel awkward for being the only person who didn’t remain anonymous. 😛
I love the idea of a TMTF webcomic. 🙂 Sadly, even if I were a competent artist — which I most definitely am not — I’m not sure I could write jokes with any consistency. I like to think there’s an element of humor in my writing, but a wry style is quite a different gift from the ability to deliver punchlines on a regular basis. Cartooning is a talent I admire in others, but not one I think I could feasibly learn.
I’m glad you didn’t remain anonymous… I’d feel like a swindler if I weren’t able to deliver any donor rewards at all. 😛
I remember after one fundraising effort by a fine Christian college, there was some backlash because the college published a list of donors, thanking them for their efforts. The backlash came because some donors wanted to remain anonymous but the college forgot to check, and the would-be anonymous people were mad/annoyed/chagrined that the college thwarted their efforts to store up treasures in heaven by giving them their recognition here on earth.
Now that makes me wonder: the anonymous Operation Yuletide givers wanted to remain under the radar, so to speak. But you’ve given them recognition by highlighting them in a blog post. Does that still count? Maybe their treasure in heaven is reduced by 50% in this case, due to partial recognition?
I don’t know what else you could do, though.
Theological speculation: Due to their continued anonymity, the anonymous donors receive worldly recognition without losing any part of their heavenly reward. In a fascinating paradox, incompatible outcomes occur simultaneously. It’s like Schrödinger’s cat. (Nah, I’m just kidding.)
In all seriousness, though, I don’t believe worldly recognition and heavenly rewards are inversely proportional to each other. That’s rigidly legalistic, and also silly. 😛
To the people who say, “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret,” I must reply, “Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven!”