Last year I asked you about your Christmas traditions. I just went back and re-read them and love 'em more even now! Check out your ideas from last year here.
We have had a few festivities focusing on the fun and "magical side" of Christmas. While it has been fun and sweet, we don't want receiving gifts and eating lots of cookies to be our focus. This feels very Grinch-like, but we are teaching Santa as a fictional character. We were at a large family Christmas last night and so we explained Santa before he came. The girls were apprehensive but did a good job with enough assurance and a prayer with Little J for courage to sit on Santa's lap.
This year, a common thread that keeps coming up is doing a Christmas focusing on sacrifice and giving back. We have had a few ideas but need your ideas too!
So, AGAIN, I want to hear your traditions. Specifically I would be interested in knowing how you have incorporated giving with your children. How do you focus on Christ during the holidays? Even if you haven't implemented them, what activities have you thought of doing with your family?
We have had a few festivities focusing on the fun and "magical side" of Christmas. While it has been fun and sweet, we don't want receiving gifts and eating lots of cookies to be our focus. This feels very Grinch-like, but we are teaching Santa as a fictional character. We were at a large family Christmas last night and so we explained Santa before he came. The girls were apprehensive but did a good job with enough assurance and a prayer with Little J for courage to sit on Santa's lap.
This year, a common thread that keeps coming up is doing a Christmas focusing on sacrifice and giving back. We have had a few ideas but need your ideas too!
So, AGAIN, I want to hear your traditions. Specifically I would be interested in knowing how you have incorporated giving with your children. How do you focus on Christ during the holidays? Even if you haven't implemented them, what activities have you thought of doing with your family?
10 comments:
i've heard of families that bake a birthday cake for Jesus. i love that idea, although i haven't done it yet.
I usually try to incorporate my girls as much as possible with any "adopt a family" stuff we do. THings like picking out items similar to their likes/needs and then have them shop with me.
We usually do some sort of cake/treat to sing "happy birthday Jesus" to on christmas.
We limit our girls to 3 gifts from us (I got this one from Alisa : ) ). the wisemen brought 3 gifts to baby Jesus that day and so want to remember that as we receive too.
As our girls get bigger, I want to set aside an amount for each girl to give away herself.
And growing up, we had to make out a list of christmas gifts for Jesus - things we were going to do for others to show Christ's love at christmas. My mom still sends me the list each year. : )
Still trying to think of some other ways to make it more personal for my girls as they grow.
We do only three gifts too, and we try to make them representative of the gold, frankincense and myrrh: the gold was very precious, which equates to something that the person really wants, the frankincense represented the diety of the Christ child and so we give something that will help augment the person's spiritual life and relationship with God, and the myrrh was an ointment for the body so we give something meant for the body (clothing, lotion, whatever.) It takes a little more thought, but we like having the extra meaning there too! We often open our presents on three consecutive nights during Christmas week after reading a portion of the Christmas story. (This isn't a hard and fast tradition for us, as it changes a bit with the extended family plans every year.)
We always sang Happy Birthday to Jesus before opening our presents when we were growing up, and we usually included a tiny stocking on the fireplace to represent the Baby Jesus.
I haven't done this yet, but something I would like to do is get a children's nativity for my kids. I actually looked last year & didn't find the one i wanted. I'm envisioning letting them play with the nativity characters while I read the Christmas story for Bible time with little t.
Check out pitterpatterart.com for their advent giving. It's a fabulous way to instill giving in your children. we're definately doing something like that next year.
We also do only 3 gifts, serve food at the homeless shelter on New Years Day (Christmas is alwas so busy that the little ones in our family always get trampled on by volunteers), sing Happy Birthday Jesus.
This year we added reading the story of Jesus' birth before bedtime while G explores the manger people
I grew up in a home where Christmas was mostly about gifts. We got TONS of presents! Anything and everything we could think of we received. And, while I'm definatly not complaining about that, as an adult, I'm not sure that is the tradition I would like to pass on. Hubby and I have discussed our traditions focusing more on the Christ child, his amazing birth, family, and friends. We have decided that if we ever have children in our home, we will limit our gifts to this: something you want, something you need, something to wear, something to read. We also think that if they are older children, we may add an additional gift of money that they would be required to use to bless others with (teaching the gift of giving). I like the idea of 3 symbolic gifts though...that's pretty neat. Maybe we will rethink our list....
Have you ever heard of the Christmas Adventure Box? The woman who writes this blog presented it to our MomLife group last year - while I didn't get myself in gear to implement it this year, I am excited to next year!
http://christmasadventurebox.blogspot.com/
Our family ususally does a 12 days of Christmas(after the song) for a family in need in our area. One year we did it for a kid in my class that had lost a parent to cancer,etc. We always do it as a suprise and never tell. We simply adapte the song to things easily found and dropped the things at their door on the every night until Christmas.
We used to each get to fill an operation Christmas child box and then send it in.
Our church does and Angel Tree gift program. This year, my husband and I were fortunate enough to adopt a whole family (and even more cool - they go to our church!) Being anonymous about the whole thing, we are busy shopping for this family, putting their names on the presents and are going to be delivering them as well! I'm excited to have our little ones be a part of this in the future - buying gifts for those less fortunate. We have a list of things they need (dishes, sheets, etc.) and a list of some of their likes (toys, etc. for the kids). It will be fun when our kids can help pick out the toys and having a whole family to shop for instead of 1 gift for a child whos name you don't know is exciting!
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