http://www.heifer.org

If you are looking for a great charity- check out Heifer. What it is, is you are buying a family a future buy supplying them an animal or animals that help them become self sufficient- you buy them a flock of geese, the geese eat the weeds & bugs in their garden, their waste feeds the garden, their eggs feed the family, & in some cases the geese feed the family. When the geese have babies- they are asked to donate them to another needy family & so on & so on. The same thing goes for a goat or llama- check out the site they tell it much better than I do. I think these would be great Christmas gifts in addition to the normal "retail" things we buy people.