Just a quick note....

This is a copy of the letter I just wrote to a local newspaper columnist regarding some advice I had taken from him. I thought that on this day before Christmas, it might be a bit of an inspiration for some. Thank you for reading!!!

Dear Clay,


I am an avid reader of your column. I admire your work a great deal and being the trivia/ "useless information" buff that I am, I find myself using your column as a source of wisdom(?). With this is in mind, I must also mention that I have recently used your column as a source of advice. I took my 6 year old shopping this last week. It was the morning your column mentioned that we should remember how difficult this time of year is for cashiers and retail employees in general. Standing in line at one of the Mega Stores, I noticed how flustered and haggard the retirement aged cashier was. It had been a long day and the goobers in front of me were not making things any easier. Then once my daughter and I reached the front of the line, one of the items I had for purchase would not scan so, frustrated, she had to go through the steps of entering the item in manually. As she was doing this I instructed my 6 year old to get me a bag of M & M's. She brought the M & M's with a great deal of excitement (thinking they were hers) and I handed them to the cashier. The cashier rang them and started to hand them to my sweet patootie and I stopped her. I said, "No, those are for you." She looked at me confused for a moment. My daughter had the same strange look on her face. I calmly mentioned that her day was more difficult than ours and that she could probably use them more. She was speechless and bleary eyed. The woman behind me just thought that was the neatest thing she had ever seen in all of her 70 years. My daughter informed the cashier, after figuring out what Daddy was doing, that "That's called giving. It's what you do at Christmas." Thank you Clay. Thank you for teaching me a new way to enjoy this time of year. Thank you for showing me a new way to teach my daughter about this time of year. Thank you for doing what you do. You have helped this part-time Grinch expand his tiny heart 3 sizes bigger.

Sincerely,

Bradley Jones