Christmas Update

At the beginning of December, I posted this post on our family Christmas traditions. I said I’d be posting more posts about how our traditions are going but honestly have not made time for it because I’ve been enjoying Christmas time so much! This one will probably be the only one I do before Christmas.

Our daily Christmas Devotionals have brought the Christmas spirit into our home and family more quickly and more powerfully than any year before! Every time someone asks me how I'm doing, I enthusiastically say I'm doing great and that I love this time of year. I find myself telling everyone how awesome our Christmas Devotionals are! I hope I don't come off as bragging—I just want to share it because it's making us so happy. It has been so wonderful to sing worshipful Christmas hymns each day and read scriptures together each day and set goals to serve people each day! I’ve learned that singing sacred music before reading scriptures really helps us kids get into scripture study more.

Also, our Church is doing this amazing Advent social media campaign called #LightTheWorld. It complements our Christmas Devotionals so well because each day there is a video that highlights something Christ did and how we can do it too in our own way! We’ve added these 30 second videos to our daily devotionals and have used the theme of each one to inform the gift we give the Savior that day.

The greatest blessing that has come of this is watching our kids get excited about doing good things. When the daily theme was “Heal the Sick”, one of our children chose to take all of the money in his little bank and give it to Primary Children’s hospital. When the theme was “Clothe the Naked”, one of them went and got some clothes and wanted to give them to people who don’t have clothes. One child likes to hold the baby Jesus from the nativity while we sing the daily Christmas hymn and always says, “I help Jesus” when we ask what gift we’ll give to the Savior each day. Seeing them do these things is such a blessing because they are doing them of their own accord.

Through all of this, I am reflecting a lot on Ebenezer Scrooge and how Dickens said that he learned to keep Christmas all year long. I wonder if there are aspects of our Christmas Devotionals that we should do even after Christmas is over. I don’t want them to become cliché or too normal for our kids so I think we’ll definitely have some aspects of the devotionals that are unique to December but maybe we can sing before scripture study all year long and maybe we can set and report on goals with scripture study somehow the rest of the year.

How have your Christmas traditions gone this year? What do you think it means to keep Christmas all year long?