Gumball Dynasty

Move over, ducks.  The Gumball Dynasty is a-comin’.

It all started with the World Vision Christmas catalog.  At the table one night, we poured over it:  “Look!  A goat for only $75!  A water buffalo will set you back $1100.”  You might be surprised to hear that we are contemplating buying livestock, but on the other hand, maybe that is the kind of kooky thing you’ve come to expect from the Morgans.  Who wouldn’t want to share space with a llama, after all?

Of course, it wouldn’t actually be for us.  World Vision, as you probably already know, helps needy people around the world, and this is their annual gift-a-thon.  For $548, for instance, you can send a live nativity scene to a modern-day Bethlehem somewhere around the world: a donkey, a sheep, a goat, and a pair of chickens.  Manger not included.

I love, love, love the World Vision Christmas catalog.  I am right there along with my 8-year-old, who wants to give not a single sheep, but the whole darn farm:  28 farm animals for under $2500.  What?!  So the kids and I were brainstorming.  Could a kid raise that kind of money?  How?

So we got online to research kids and fundraising, and we started planning the bread we could sell, the crafts we could make, the bubblegum… huh?  Did you know that kids can have their very own bubblegum machine?  You know, the kind you put a quarter in and get a handful of M&Ms or a giant ball of cement with a bright candy coating?  My kids, doing some math, were all astonishment.  Gumball machine:  $100.  One bag of gumballs yields:  $200.

Little Man might just be the next Philip Anschutz, because since making this discovery, he has changed all of his previous Christmas wish list plans.  Now the only thing he wants for Christmas is a paid-in-full gumball machine , half of the proceeds of which he intends to use to buy a farm for World Vision.  (He wants to reinvest the other half into more gumballs until he has his own little vending route and enough money to fund college and a lifetime supply of Nerf guns.)

Can I just say, I wish I were so creative, caution-to-the-wind, and passionately generous as my 8-year-old?  Here’s to the gumball dynasty.  Here’s to 28 farm animals and a village lifted from hunger to abundance, and the knowledge that they are deeply loved.