Christ-Centered Christmas

DECORATIONS

This year we focused on Christ throughout the whole season.

We started with the decorating- tons of nativities inside and a big one outside.

(I showed pictures in previous posts)

MUSIC

We sang a lot of Christmas primary songs and hymns throughout the month.

We learned to sing "Silent Night" in 4 part harmony and 

went caroling to the nursing home where Donny's mom was recovering.

We had a tender experience in one of the rooms- we sang to one elderly lady

as her family gathered to say good-bye to her in this life.  She died that evening.

We also caroled to many of our neighbor's and Donny's home-teaching families.

We love to sing "Mary's Lullaby" and "Shepherd's Carol" because they have such beautiful harmony.

I learned to play an awesome version of "Let there be peace on earth" on the piano.

BOOKS

We read Christmas stories every evening together for "family reading."

Here are a few of our favorite Christmas books: 

The Mansion, Good King Wenceslas, and "A Christmas Treasury for Latter-day Saint families"
I also read through the 4 gospels throughout the month.
(Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John)
Christmas morning for family scripture study we
had each child hold up a picture and tell a story from Christ's life.

MOVIES
Every Wednesday and Saturday we had family movie night
so we could make it through all the Christ-centered movies we could find.
Here are some of our favorites:

ACTIVITES
Christmas Eve we had Grandma Anderson and two other women in our ward
over for a turkey dinner and a meaningful evening.
We read Christmas stories by the fire,
played Christmas bell songs,
and acted out the nativity story (written by Sadie)

Christmas Day we went to temple square to see the temple and the lights.

GIFTS
We gave our neighbors homemade wheat bread with a note
about how Christ is called "the bread of life"
and that he was born in Bethlehem= "the house of bread."

We gave our kids food storage items that they wanted.

(That was their idea after going two months living off food storage)

Myriam and Sadie did buy some fun toys for each kid as well.

Breakfast was in their stockings- oranges, apples, bananas, cereal, nuts, and gum.

SERVICE
I made it a goal to work on family history everday in November and December.
Donny and I took a lot of family names to the temple in Nov & Dec
and were able to go twice with my parents over the holidays.