The holidays present a quick and convenient way to donate to charitable causes, particularly the Salvation Army. Outside every retail outlet, it seems, a volunteer has set up shop with a bell and a kettle. I usually pitch the change from my transaction into the kettle (as if you didn’t know<\/i> I use cash!) when I encounter one of these bell ringers. I know it’s a little bit, but cumulatively a lot of little bits add up.<\/p>\n
However, I don’t care to put the money in an unattended kettle. I don’t know where the bell ringers go, but I find a lot of kettles that had previously featured the melody of unenthusiastic and sometimes almost-frostbitten bellringing accompanied by a rousing rendition of John Cage’s 4’33”<\/a>. I don’t know what NLRB regulations dictate for professional bell ringers, or what union benefits they enjoy, but they get a lot of warm-up, cigarette, coffee, and\/or lunch breaks.<\/p>\n Now, it’s not that I want to be any less a nice guy when this happens, but I don’t want to throw change into an unguarded repository. Partly, it’s because I don’t want it to get stolen. Also, partly it’s because I don’t want to just be a Pavlovian dog. I refuse to respond to the stimulus of the red kettle unless I hear the bell ringing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The holidays present a quick and convenient way to donate to charitable causes, particularly the Salvation Army. Outside every retail outlet, it seems, a volunteer has set up shop with a bell and a kettle. I usually pitch the change from my transaction into the kettle (as if you didn’t know I use cash!) when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22280,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions\/22280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}