Give the gift of love to someone for the holidays... Here's how

If you've been following my blog, you know that I ran a marathon recently and enlisted the support of my friends to call me throughout the race. It was so touching to get those wonderful calls from friends and I thought how great it would be to listen to them at whenever I might be lonely or in need of support.

Then it dawned on me that I could easily make a recording like this for someone else... and I thought of the perfect person who deserves it: my friend with ALS, Craig Dunham!

All I had to do was set up a conference call and record it! It's all very easy with a free tool called FreeConferencePro.com. FreeConferencePro is great! I use it all the time for podcasts. All you have to do is press *9 to record and *9 again to end and you get your recording in both .mp3 and .wav formats.

So I invited all of Craig's friends and family to call and talk about why they are thankful to have him in their lives. I suggested they could leave a poem, a prayer, talk about memories, or just tell Craig how much they love him. I got lots of responses and my email got passed on to others who knew him. I had a full group of people for the first call on Saturday morning. I have three other calls scheduled and it's very easy to do, so I can accommodate anyone who wants to participate. Once I have all the recordings, I can merge the .mp3 files together into one long .mp3 file that Craig can listen to any time.

I can't imagine how lonely it must be for Craig at times and I don't know if he's even going to have family here at Thanksgiving, but at least he will have a lot of voices telling him how much we love him.

Whether it's a graduation, wedding, marathon, get well wish, a holiday or any time -- it's so nice to be surrounded by the voices of people we love. Why not surprise someone with a recording filled with love for the holidays this year?