So, the Christmas season has officially begun. My house is decorated, the lights are up, the Advent Calendar is all filled in (more on that later) and I am working on the Christmas cards. The fact that today is December 1 also means that my Holidays in Hand class is at full speed.
Today my card says "May your walls know joy, may every room hold laughter, and every window open to great possibility." --Mary Anne Radmacher. That is a good goal for the holidays season as well! My assignments are : Write my thoughts about our family's holiday values, Photograph a "welcome to December!" photo of my family, Do (fill in the blank) and Make (fill in the blank). Every day I will have assignments like those. And every day I am supposed to spend 20 minutes with some sort of paper craft or something festive and relaxing. Today, that's easy. I'm scrapbooking the entire day with my friends Amy & Dee. Yay! I am also working on my Make project there as well. My Do for today is to work on the December '08 scrapbook and the photograph for today is going to have to wait until my family wakes up!
So, now I must write about my thoughts about our family's holiday values. We have two very important values, I believe. The first is celebrating the gift of Jesus coming down to earth as a man and the second is family, which is God's gift to us as well. I think we pretty much have our priorities straight overall. Sure, we often get caught up in the rest of it, but I think underlying our busy-ness is the desire to celebrate those two gifts as much as possible. We give many gifts as a family - we love to. I think it stems from feeling so immensely blessed with God's good gifts to us, that we want to share that with the rest of our family and others. We also work hard to instill in our children the sense that we are abundantly blessed and we have more than we could possibly need - so we give things away and try to donate our time when we make gifts, etc. I hope that as they grow older they come up with their own ideas of how to serve and give to others in response to God's call.
I am also asked on my assignment for today to remember my earliest holiday memory. That's tough. I'm sure the Christmas I was 4 and we came to visit my grandparents would be the first real memory. I don't remember a lot of specifics, and I'm sure some of the memories are interspersed with other trips to my grandparents home over the course of that year, but I do remember the fireplace and the Christmas tree in that house and I remember my grandpa being there and him playing with us downstairs in their house.
How about you? What's your earliest holiday memory? What are your thoughts about your holiday values? What are you going to do today to document and remember this Christmas season?
1 comment:
Just wanted you to know that your posts are never boring and that I enjoy a little introspection once in a while. Just to prove it...my earliest Christmas memory is standing up in front of church for the Christmas program as a lamb. All I could think about was getting home to open a present. My parents always let us open one gift on church program night if we did a good job.
Whenever my kids seem to be getting a little too caught up in the present part of Christmas, it does me good to remember that I was a kid once too before I get too preachy with them.
Wow...long comment
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