Leading article: The kindness of strangers reaches around the world

Despite the chill wind of recession it has been, for most of us, a Christmas of the usual festivities. Some families, for whom the increase in the unemployment figures towards the three million mark is more than a statistic, have had to make severe economies. But for the majority, even if our celebrations have been a touch more modest than in previous years, this is still a time of profusion and plenty.

That explains why the Boxing Day tsunami four years ago made such an impact on the global psyche. The contrast between our Christmas comfort and the devastation inflicted upon the families of the 275,000 people who perished was sudden and stark. Lives taken for granted were swept to oblivion in moments. The drama so shocked the world that it responded with the most generous round of giving ever recorded.

But there is more to such tragedies than a moment of televised drama, as we report today in another account of the work of the three charities we have chosen to support in our Christmas Appeal. A number of the professional healthworkers working for Voluntary Service Overseas are in place in the 14 countries around the Indian Ocean that were affected when the giant wave of water arose. But nowhere is their work more striking than in Sri Lanka where, as we report today, the combined impact of the tsunami and 25 years of civil war have resulted in almost one in eight people suffering some form of mental illness. We are used to the idea of aid workers rushing to disaster zones with emergency food and tents, but this is a sober reminder that disasters linger beyond the drama and that many of the scars they leave are not visible to the television camera.

The same is true of much of the work of our other two charities, Action on Disability and Development and One World Action, both of which look beyond emergencies to ask what makes people poor, or rather keeps them poor, and fund ways in which they can be helped to assert themselves and change their world for the better.

Our Christmas Appeal is a counterpoint in another way too. Though the stories it brings can be dramatic and moving, they are rarely depressing. For they are stories of hope, of people who are battling against the odds and taking control of their destinies. That is appropriate to the Christmas season which, whether in pagan traditions about the rebirth of the winter sun after the shortest day, or in Christian theologies of new life, is a celebration of hope and of human optimism.

The appeal, like the tsunami, is an interruption of the usual rhythms of life. It reminds us of the existence of different realities from our own quotidian round. It inspires us to the possibility of something different. By focusing on lives that are so very different, and so much less fortunate, than our own, it also tells again stories of the importance of the kindness of strangers.

This is a season for kindness, generosity, altruism, compassion and those indefinable virtues that we gather into the simple word we call love and which is the corrective to so much of what ails our world today. An act of kindness may seem random, but each one drives something negative from our lives. Where there is kindness there is less room for greed or envy or disdain or hatred. A single act of kindness, however small, blots out something from the face of indifference, apathy and evil. We are those strangers. Even amid fears over the future, never be scared to do something kind today.