I thought the young couple was going to pass me by, but I was wrong. I was wrong a lot that day.

The young man was carrying a long package out of Walmart, a sound box purchased at a Black Friday price. His girlfriend was hauling several bags and they seemed to be in a rush to get where they were going.

Then they paused, captivated momentarily by the familiar sounds of The Salvation Army bells.

“Here you go,” the young man said, using his free hand to pluck a bill out of his pocket. “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas,” his girlfriend echoed. “And thank you.”

Then they were gone, a blur across the crowded parking lot. Before they had reached their car, another pair approached The Salvation Army kettle. This was a young mother with a toddler tucked under one arm. The little girl held a strategically folded bill in her pink hand.

“What do you say?” the girl’s mother prodded.

“Merry Christmas,” the little girl said, and smiled.

The kid leaned over, nearly falling out of her mother’s clutch so she could stuff the bill into the bright red kettle.

“Thank you,” the kettle man said.

“Welcome,” the girl said, with no need for prodding. “Merry Christmas.”

The Annual Red Kettle Christmas Campaign was underway, and boy, was I wrong about the holiday shoppers. Harried women with bags in each hand would nonetheless pause to place an offering in the kettle. Old men with hard gazes would suddenly soften and become chatty as they found crumpled bills or loose change to give to The Salvation Army.

“That’s the best uniform in the world,” one white-haired man said, poking at the kettle keeper’s red bib. “Nobody has more respect for The Salvation Army than I do, let me tell you.”

That was Dan Lalonde, who years back served as deputy fire chief in Lewiston. He recalled freezing cold nights battling fires and The Salvation Army trucks that would invariably arrive, offering hot coffee to the firemen and so much more to the people whose lives had been ravaged by flames.

You know who else appreciates the work that The Salvation Army does? The kettle keepers themselves, brave men and women who stand in the cold, ringing their bells and offering their greetings for sometimes eight hours straight.

There were four of them at Walmart on Black Friday and not a single one of them wished to be anywhere else. That’s the thing about being a kettle keeper: It’s unpaid work and completely voluntary. Nobody is there unless they want to be.

Joseph Hiscock is 35 years old and he’s been ringing those bells for more than half of those years. He’s been doing it since he was a teenager who saw a close friend burned out of his home.

“He had nothing,” Hiscock said. “He was out on the street.”

Hiscock’s friend finally reached out for help to The Salvation Army and help is what he got: clothes to wear, food to eat, temporary shelter and assistance with finding permanent living arrangements. Hiscock never forgot it.

“They were amazing,” he said. “I consider this a way of trying to give back.”

And Jeff Reynolds who, with his bushy white beard and considerable belly, looks enough like Santa Clause that children want to give him their Christmas lists. Reynolds has been volunteering at the kettles for four years and a happier volunteer you will never meet.

The cold doesn’t bother him: “You just dress for it, that’s all. Dress in layers. It gets cold, sure, but as long as you’re prepared for it, you’ll be all right.”

Eight hours of incessant bells doesn’t bother him, either: “People think it must drive me crazy, but it doesn’t. I love the sound of the bells.”

The bell ringers wish everybody a happy holiday or a pleasant afternoon whether they’ve contributed to the kettles or not. Nobody is keeping score here. There is no running tally and no judgment.

The generosity of people can be surprising.

“I’ve had people come up to me with a dime in their hands,” Reynolds said. “They drop it in the kettle and say, ‘I’m sorry. It’s all I’ve got.’ That really touches me.”

According to Salvation Army Lt. Dan Johnson, tasked with organizing the volunteers, people are generous because they know of the important work the volunteers do. The Salvation Army has been helping victims of fire, hunger, homelessness and other calamities for 150 years, after all. Few people need to Google them to get a grasp of what the nonprofit is about.

“People see what we do all the time,” Johnson said. “They know we’re out there helping people.”

Still, there’s nothing wrong with a little bit of vetting.

A boy of about 6 years approached the kettle, a couple dollar bills in hand. His mother was smiling over him, but the boy was pondering the kettle itself and the sign above it.

“What is it for?” he asked the kettle keeper. “What do you do with the money.”

The kettle keeper started to explain, but the boy’s mom had it covered.

“They help people all over the place,” she explained. “When somebody’s house burns down or something, the Salvation Army gets them clothes and food to eat.”

The explanation was good enough for the lad. He thought it over a second or two longer and then stuffed his bills into the kettle, giving them a final tap to make sure they got all the way in.

“Merry Christmas,” he said.

I’ll get you on the way out

People approach the kettles in a variety of ways. For some, it’s an afterthought – you see them digging through their pockets or rifling through a purse just a step or two short of the doors.

Some become aware of the kettles and bells when they’re still in the parking lot. They make sure they have a fistful of change or a bill in hand long before they reach the doors.

“Some people,” said Hiscock, “actually come dancing over to us. It’s a great thing to see.”

A minute or two later there was evidence of this. A middle-aged woman came charging out of Walmart with a smile on her face and a bill in her hands. She was almost literally dancing as she approached the kettle and its keepers.

“Merry Christmas!” she exclaimed. “Thank you for everything you do!”

Still others will make their donations without a word or even a smile. They don’t look at the kettle keeper, they don’t engage in conversation.

It’s all good. As long as people know that The Salvation Army is there and why. There will be greetings offered either way.

“There are people,” Reynolds said, “who have told me that they saw me when they pulled in to park and they heard my bell as they were walking toward the store. But they didn’t really think about me at all until I said hello or Merry Christmas.”

And yes, the traditional holiday greeting is still A-OK with the people of The Salvation Army. They don’t insist that their kettle keepers specifically say “Merry Christmas” to the shoppers, but they don’t forbid it, either.

“I’ve had people who actually refused to put anything in the kettle,” Reynolds said, “because I didn’t say ‘Merry Christmas.'”

There are people who don’t look at the bell ringers at all, no matter what greetings are offered. Some are in the middle of phone conversations, others are texting, some just stare straight ahead and acknowledge no one around them. Their indifference doesn’t vex the kettle keepers.

“It’s that time of year,” Reynolds said. “People are off in their own little worlds. They have a lot going on.”

But by and large, people are generous this year. Women in particular seem drawn to the red kettles — and women with young children even more so. When men give, they tend to stay a little longer and dig a little deeper. Either approach is just fine with the kettle keepers.

The volunteers have been manning the kettles since the start of the most epic shopping day of the year. Hiscock was around when the hordes assembled at the front of the stores, waiting for midnight and the Black Friday mad rush that followed.

“People have been in good moods,” Hiscock said. “Last night, when it all got started, it was the first time I’ve seen everybody moving in a single file into the store. There wasn’t any pushing and shoving, and nobody got hurt.”

Of course, Black Friday was also freakishly warm for late November. Temperatures were in the mid-50s and some shoppers were out in T-shirts. The Salvation Army bell ringers know that before the holiday season is over, there will be bitter cold hours, and standing in the same spot for hours will be a test.

“When it gets really cold like that, we’ll have two people out here,” Lt. Johnson said. “They can rotate in and out so everybody can take breaks and get warm.”

Hiscock and Reynolds are plenty warm on Black Friday. In fact, both men wish for snow. When it starts to snow, Hiscock said, you can almost see the moods of the people rise. It creates a more festive mood and the donations come a little faster.

Keeping it local

The Salvation Army gets as many groups as they can to help man the kettles. The firefighters themselves will do it once or twice a season, and volunteers come from groups like the Rotary and Optimist clubs. The bell ringers stand at several locations in the Twin Cities. All the major grocery stores are covered, and this year they have volunteers working outside the Hobby Lobby. Each store sets its own rules regarding what hours the volunteers will be there and other small matters.

The people who have been manning the kettles for many years have seen a little bit of everything. Folks come with jars full of change collected over an entire year and give every last penny to the kettles. Nationally, donors have been known to slide checks into the kettles in amounts rising into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Locally, Johnson recalled one man, a waiter, who handed over an entire night’s tips to a kettle keeper outside what used to be Florian’s Market in Auburn.

Most people hand over their money without question; The Salvation Army’s reputation is enough for them. Others want to know the specifics of how that money is going to be used. A few, Johnson said, want reassurances that their donations will be kept local – they don’t want their money to be used for administrative costs, for example, in some far-flung place.

In fact, all Salvation Army fundraising is done on a local or regional basis. There is no fundraising on a national level. Furthermore, according to Salvation Army records, 82 cents of every dollar spent goes directly to client services, a rate that is among the highest for any major nonprofit in the world. Annual reports and other information is made available on The Salvation Army website.

For the most part, people either donate to the kettles or they don’t. There is very little negotiating or deep discussion, only greetings, small talk and the clatter of change finding its way to the bottom. For this kettle ringer, manning The Salvation Army kettles was among the most rewarding experiences in many years. It’s not hard work and the up-close view of generosity and good cheer offsets the cold and monotony.

Why Johnson has found himself himself short of volunteers this year isn’t completely clear. Typically, he has enough manpower to keep bell ringers at every store in shorter shifts. This season, though, times are tough.

“We’ve been short,” Johnson said. “I usually (schedule) two shifts during the day, but I’ve had to cut it down to one shift.”

Instead of workers manning the kettles from 10 a.m. til 3 p.m. and then more from 3 til 6 p.m., for example, Johnson now has to ask his volunteers to work a longer 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. shift. Unpaid. In the cold.

The people he has, Johnson said, are fantastic. The issue is that he needs more of them to get all the stores covered for as many hours as possible. Volunteers tend to be people who are out of the work force, either retired or collecting disability. But even those people can run into circumstances that render them unavailable for service.

“We have our regulars,” Johnson said, “but things come up. It’s a difficult thing for us (to get volunteers).”

That’s a shame. It shouldn’t be.

Outside Walmart on Black Friday, an older woman stopped to fetch some change from her purse. She dropped it into the kettle and then smiled at the bell ringer. But a smile was not enough. Just the sight of the hardworking men and women in their familiar red bibs appeared to sweep the lady with a wave of holiday cheer. She spread her arms out wide and insisted on a hug before going on her way.

At least in this one little spot, Black Friday wasn’t all horror and carnage and self-indulgence.

“People,” said Reynolds, “can be pretty great.”

The origin of The Salvation Army’s red kettle

In December of 1891, Captain Joseph McFee of The Salvation Army in San Francisco, Calif., was stumped. He wanted to provide a Christmas dinner for 1,000 poor people, but had no way to pay for it.

Then, an idea. He thought back to when he was as a sailor in Liverpool, England, where, on the docks of the city’s waterfront, he remembered seeing a large pot into which charitable donations could be thrown.

The next day, McFee secured permission to place a brass urn at the Oakland ferry landing. Beside the pot, he placed a sign that read “Keep the Pot Boiling.” Soon, he had all the money he needed to fund the Christmas dinner.

Two years later, McFee’s fundraising idea had expanded to 30 kettle locations on the West Coast. He’d grown the program with help from two young Salvation Army officers named William A. McIntyre and N.J. Lewis.

Soon after Christmas in 1895, McIntyre and Lewis were transferred to the East Coast. They took with them the idea of a Christmas kettle.

McIntyre was stationed in Boston. During the 1897 Christmas season, he, his wife and sister set up three kettles in the heart of the city. Their effort, combined with others on the West Coast and elsewhere, resulted in 150,000 Christmas dinners for the poor nationwide.

Red kettles spread to the Big Apple, where the New York World newspaper hailed them as “the newest and most novel device for collecting money.” The newspaper also observed, “There is a man in charge to see that contributions are not stolen.”

In 1901, kettle donations in New York City funded a massive sit-down Christmas dinner at Madison Square Garden. The meal became a tradition for many years.

The rest, as they say, is history. McFee’s idea launched a tradition that has spread not only throughout the United States, but across the world. Although red kettles are not found in all of the 126 countries The Salvation Army serves in, they can be found in such distant lands as Korea, Japan, Chile and many European countries.

Source: Salvationarmynorth.org

Want to volunteer?

The Salvation Army needs volunteers for the kettles this holiday season Mondays through Saturdays until Christmas Eve. Want to help?

Visit: 67 Park St., Lewiston

Call: 207-783-0801

Email: [email protected] or [email protected]

Unique kettle donations

An anonymous donor in Boston slipped a wedding band and a diamond engagement ring into a red kettle, along with a jeweler’s appraisal and this heartfelt note:

“I’ve dropped my wedding ring in your red kettle knowing that the money from its sale will buy toys for needy children. In all seasons, my husband was a giver. I especially remember his joy in giving at Christmastime, especially to those in need. To honor his memory, I donate this ring. I’m hoping there’s someone out there who made lots of money this year and will buy the ring for ten times its worth. After all, there’s no price on love or the sentimental value of this ring. But money will help the kids. May everyone have a merry Christmas, happy holidays and happy new year!”

Read more at blog.salvationarmyusa.org/2014/12/31/unique-kettle-donations