Several months ago Marilyn Assaf told me about a wonderful thing that happened to her last Christmas. The further she got into the story, the more I could feel her energy and excitement.

A couple of weeks before Christmas, twelve days to be exact, Marilyn came home to find a beautifully wrapped gift hanging on her front door. Inside was an equally beautiful note.

“On the first day of Christmas,” it read, “my true friend gave to me … An ornament for my tree,” and of course the gift was an ornament.

The next day another gift appeared; beautifully wrapped with a note that read, “On the second day of Christmas my true friend gave to me … Two hedgehogs.”

And so it went day after day; Three golf balls; Four chocolate reindeer; Five golden balls; Six candles burning; Seven fortune cookies; Eight icy squares; Nine bath beads; Ten chocolates; Eleven tasty cookies, and finally, on the twelfth day -- Christmas Eve -- Twelve candy canes and “something to remember me by.”

This gift had two packages. The first had twelve candy canes and the second contained a Christmas tree ornament, a big, beautiful ornament, with one word on it, “Joy”.

After the fourth or fifth gift had arrived, Marilyn began to suspect that her friend, Joy Brown, was the secret Santa. So when they met at their daughters’ Christmas concert, she confronted her, but all she got was a straight faced reply; a reply that convinced her it must be someone else.

After the third day, as Marilyn and her children approached home, they could feel their excitement building, and they would run to the door to see if a gift had arrived. Sometimes one was there and sometimes not. Sometimes even when they would check after dinner, nothing would be there, but then at 10 o’clock or later, there it would be.

Once the doorbell rang and a young stranger asked if she was Marilyn and gave her a gift. Another time an older couple were the gift bearers and several neighbours joined in as well.

“Even as I talk about this now,” Marilyn told me, “I feel a strong sense of gratitude for the time and effort Joy spent to help make my Christmas more joyful. It’s something that will stay with me the rest of my life, and it’s something that will affect the way I treat other people, not only at Christmas but year round.

My goal with this column is to motivate readers to take positive action in their own lives. This would be a pretty good idea to act on.

Merry Christmas. I’ve written this early so, should you choose to try this, you’ll have time for this year.