It’s the third Thursday of the month when I link up with other Hearts at Home bloggers who tackle the topic of the month. Today’s topic is about Christmas giving. What are your family’s giving traditions? What do you do to encourage your kids to “give” instead of “get?”
I’ll share about our family and then you can hop around to be inspired by other moms on this topic (if you receive my posts via email, you can click here to get the links to the Blog Hop blogs!)
Speaking of giving…today is the day I gave birth to our daughter Erica 22 years ago! She was our Christmas baby. Now she’s living back home with her sweet daughter Marie while her hubby is deployed to Afghanistan. We love having her and Marie at home during this unique season of life. Happy Birthday, Erica!
Our family is only all together every other Christmas. This year is our year! Our adult kids will arrive during the day on Christmas Eve so we can go to our church’s Christmas Eve service together. We will then head to Outback Steakhouse where we have the ONLY meal of the year where Mark and I take all the kids out to dinner. We love giving that gift to our family because we rarely ate out when our kids were growing up. We budget all year to give that gift.
On Christmas morning, we will open gifts one at a time. We enjoy watching the receiver’s response to the gift. Then we enjoy Rhodes cinnamon rolls for breakfast. The remainder of the day will be filled with holiday food, spontaneous games of euchre, watching home movies or Christmas movies, and just enjoying being together as a family.
Outside of our family celebration we have participated in giving activities in several ways: We always give an extra gift to our Compassion child, some years we have filled shoeboxes for children through Samaritan’s Purse, one year we learned of a single mom whose family was moving into a home with no furniture so we adopted her by collecting and delivering furniture, Christmas gift, and a tree. Other years we’ve taken food to homeless people on the street in our town.
What about you? What does your family do to focus on giving? What holiday traditions do you have to celebrate the birth of Christ?
We do some of the same things you mentioned. We gave extra to our Compassion kids and filled some shoeboxes for kids through Samaritan’s Purse. A tradition I’ve loved the last couple of years is a Jesus birthday party. It’s a fun celebration, plus a time for the kids to witness giving as we collect donations for a local food pantry and money to buy gifts for families through the Compassion International gift catalog. I blogged about it here: http://www.kristinhilltaylor.com/2012/12/celebrating-giving-happy-birthday-jesus.html
Merry Christmas!
I haven’t written an article on the blog about our giving traditions, but I was able to show my four year old son the act of giving in person this year. We often donate old toys, household goods and food, but all he sees are places the things go. He never saw actual people receive them.
I try and tell him about how blessed we are and how there are times when others need a little extra help.
I was also able to explain the reason Santa can’t visit everyone and how he needs our help. My son really enjoyed playing a secret Santa this year to a mother and her three children who needed help.
He actually got to see the responses, see one of the children and physically hand over food, toys and other items for Christmas to their mother.
That is an experience that taught him more than any lecture I could give him about giving.
We’ve picked a tag to donate clothing to the homeless shelter from our giving tree at church, and we’ve done Toys for Tots and food donations. My son is only 4 so it’s hard to get him to understand there are people in need even with these examples. I love the post about letting him shop through the Heifer catalog, I think we’ll try to do that tonight! Thanks for the inspiration, and the links to all the other great blogs too!
I love the traditions you’ve mentioned here. We’ve had fun giving in many of the same ways over the years. I’ve found, that often my little ones are more generous naturally than I am. Humbling. And beautiful. I’m grateful that Jesus leads me so often through the five who call me “mom.” Merry Christmas, Jill! And happy birthday to your Christmas baby! (I’ve got one of those, too.. best stocking stuffer of my life! 🙂 )
I love that y’all get to all be together for the holiday! My family has always been spread across the country, so that rarely happens. We love giving extra to Nthiani, our Compassion child, and this year in lieu of gifts for any adults, we chose items from the Heifer and Compassion catalogs to give in their names. The adults loved it, because we all truly have everything we need, and the littles loved knowing that we were helping bring water and flocks of chicks to families in need! Also love learning that your euchre players… we’re card sharks ourselves! 😉