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? 

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