If you have email at your home or office, you know the trials and tribulations of trying to filter out as much “spam” (junk-email) as possible. But every once in a while a piece of spam slips in, and yesterday I learned that it can occasionally bring a gem.

Yesterday, an unknown sender sent me an email with the following subject line:  “My Plan to Fix World.”  Can you imagine?  Think of the possibilities!  Now, this particular email was trying to sell me something, but I was suddenly fixated on what was my own personal plan to fix the world.

In order to build a plan you have to have a mission.  What would my world mission be?  World peace, universal love, the end of world hunger, save the children, save the whales… the list could go on and on.  But the question I couldn’t get out of my head was what was I doing to save, fix, or improve something in the world?  In my own personal way, what was I personally doing every day to fix the world?  When I stopped to think about it, I had to admit, I wasn’t doing very much.

So, in October, the first month of fall, the month of harvest, in this month, I will host a “Fix Your World Party.”  I’m going to invite some friends over for a little gathering to brainstorm about what they are doing today to fix the world, find out what groups and charities they are already supporting, or know about and then build my own personal plan.  A great big humongous problem, like world hunger for instance, cannot be solved in an evening, but to use an old adage, if you want to eat an elephant, you have to start with one small bite.  So, by gathering my friends together, I hope to be able to build a plan to start taking small steps to making the world a better place.

You might host this gathering around October 27 which is National Make a Difference Day.  This holiday was established in 1990 and is focused on neighbors helping neighbors. According the National Make a Difference website (http://usaweekend.com/diffday/aboutmadd.html),”In 2005, 3 million people cared enough about their communities to volunteer on that day, accomplishing thousands of projects in hundreds of towns.”  Now, that’s what I call making headway in eating an elephant!

Fortunately for those attending this gathering, October is National Pizza Month and National Dessert Month.  So, pizza will definitely be on the menu, and since I love to bake, it will not be a problem at all to whip up some yummy treat for dessert.  Of course, in October it will be difficult to pick whether the dessert should be made of apples, pumpkin, or, of course, there is always, my standard favorite chocolate.  Can you imagine a whole month to celebrate pizza and dessert?

October is also Family History Month.  This holiday provides a neat opportunity to learn more about your family.  It’s a great time to gather stories from your grandparents or parents, aunts, uncles, cousins about their own lives.  If the family members will allow you to video tape them while they tell their favorite family stories, you could build a video anthology.  At every family gathering you could pull one family member aside and ask them to share stories on video.

Each of my own grandmother’s wrote short histories of their lives.  These are journals penned in their own handwriting of about 20 pages each.  In these treasured pages they write about events I hadn’t even known occurred, but also they re-tell stories I had heard them tell in person hundreds of times.  These are cherished histories that I hope to pass on to my own children.

And don’t forget those old family photos.  Drag them out, be sure to document who each of the people in the photo are.  I know in my own family, we have some photos that the previous generation would have been able to identify, but now we are left only to guess at who are in the photos, or where they were taken.

Using old photos is also a great way to get family members to recount events from days gone by.  Get out those old photo albums and share some family memories.  Even if you don’t intend to do prepare a full genealogical history, sharing stories, and documenting them in your favorite way, is a wonderful way to celebrate your family and a delightful gift to leave for the generations to come.