Editor's Note: How NPOs Saved Christmas

It all helped me to refine my own focus for the holidays and to buy the majority of my gifts from catalogs produced by nonprofit organizations: fantastical toys from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, greeting cards from the Sisters of the Humility of Mary, and all sorts of things through www.igive.com, which lets you shop from stores that contribute a percentage of your sales to your charity of choice. I stopped just short of buying a llama for a poverty-stricken Latin American family in a friend’s name through Heifer International. Shopping like that, my expenditures did triple duty: The organizations made some money, and my friends got lovely gifts and an education about the charities’ missions. In some cases, the gifts kept on giving since some of the recipients adopted the organizations as their own.