A gift for themselves is a gift to others

The next year, Alexandra and her husband and mother undertook an even bolder adventure: sleeping on cots in an Immokalee, Fla., homeless shelter. On Christmas Day, they helped serve hot meals to a few thousand needy people in a city park.

After dinner, Alexandra photographed dozens of Haitian and Guatemalan children receiving toys from someone dressed as Santa Claus.

"It was very poignant to study each face as the children sat for the first time on an enormous, fluffy, Santa Claus lap," she says. "I was moved to tears almost the entire day [by] the newness, the excitement" of the moment reflected in the children's faces.

The popularity of short-term service trips in the summer is rising, but some trip leaders have hesitated to extend them into the winter holidays. Gale Hull of Ipswich, Mass., for instance, leads relief trips by Partners In Development to Haiti and Guatemala throughout the year. But she says the group has yet to offer an opportunity during Christmas week.

"We didn't think people would go," Ms. Hull says.

Still, those who have gone at Christmas say the benefits of service travel are magnified when volunteers and local residents take time together for worship, feasting, and gifts.

Last year, Joy Campbell of Lansing, Mich., and her husband, Kyle Enger, spent Christmas in a rural Tanzanian village. The only electricity came from generators and the running water was sporadic. They traveled in mid-December for pragmatic reasons, since it was the only time when both could get four consecutive weeks off from work.

But as soon as they arrived, Ms. Campbell appreciated the timing: "It was liberating to be away from the rush and the ads and the countdown to Christmas."

Through Christmas Eve, the couple worked daily on a mural and a library construction project while local residents spent long days attending to basic needs. On Christmas Day, however, everyone took a rare break. As a special treat, two village brothers ate rice and shared a Coca-Cola.

Residents donned their cleanest clothes and attended three worship services. There they performed traditional Lutheran liturgies in Swahili, with the complement of drums. At the offering, the poorest residents dropped bananas and coffee beans into the collection plate. After the benediction, a church leader auctioned off the foodstuffs in the courtyard to the highest bidders.

For Campbell, Christmas among the Tanzanians left her feeling grateful and content.

"People there get by with so little," she says. "They're content to play with sticks and sit in dirt and watch a bug.... It confirmed for me that we're on the right track" in terms of choosing to live simply, with no TV and just one car, back in the United States.

In some cases, mission trips at the holidays seem to spawn new traditions. For students and faculty at St. Joseph's College of Maine, the New Year almost always begins with a service trip. The settings aren't always pretty. Three years ago, 10 volunteers built concrete homes in the poorest slum on earth in Port-au-prince, Haiti. Last year, another 20 provided dental care to Mayan villagers in a remote mountain enclave in Guatemala.

Settings aside, Associate Professor of Theology Steven Bridge has come to regard the annual trip as "a refresher course in how to live a richer life."

"They have these rich social networks [in Guatemala], where all the adults watch all the kids, so 20 or 30 kids are playing together at any given time," Mr. Bridge says. "All the men go to work in the same cane field, and they come back together. [In Maine], we rarely see the neighbors....

"It's good to see differences, see alternative ways of doing things," he says, "rather than just think, 'This is our culture. This is the way we do it, so that's the only way there is.' "

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