I love Christmas. It’s probably my favorite time of year. I love to go out and pick the best Christmas tree and then spend a long time decorating it and I love to decorate presents with ribbons and stamps and stickers. Because of my intense enthusiasm, my kids have picked up on this, in conjunction with a kids natural excitement about Christmas.
My husband and kids got together and gave me this Nativity scene a few years ago. I love it. It’s pretty, the stable has a music box that plays “Away in the Manger,” and the figures are just adorable. I’ve mentioned before I’m working on “letting go of My Precious,” and this is another one I’m slowly working on. We’ve set up ground rules, one kid at a time can play with it, and they can’t spend all the time playing with it so their brother or sister can get a chance. I also have a very cute, but smaller and not as complete resin set. That set the kids are allowed to play with as much as they want. They can play in groups or by themselves.
The imaginative play I’ve seen come from this in just the short time the sets have been out has been so encouraging. My daughter sat there for 20 minutes singing “Away in the Manger” pointing at all of the different parts of the Nativity set as she sang it. They’ve also been playing with our felt board set acting it out. It’s helping them synthesize their understanding of different aspects of the story. Why would Herod order the death? Why didn’t everyone come see the new born king?
It being my house, we’re not just acting it out with a Nativity – of course there will be crafts galore. I’ve been gathering ideas on my Advent board all year long to add more crafts that focus on Christ’s love and his gift. We’ll be doing an odd combination of Truth in the Tinsel and a Jesse Tree program I made for my kids. I’ve figured out that in my house, for the lessons to truly sink in, I need a combination of crafts, acting it out, and games. That hits all of my kids learning styles.
There’s one last tradition for our hands on Advent that always happens. Part of our goal for Advent season is to teach our kids to give to others. Starting about two weeks before Thanksgiving I started getting the requests,
“When am I going to get presents for my brother and sister? When will we buy presents for the kids with no presents?”
They go out and buy presents for everyone else in the family – both of the siblings and Mom and Dad. If I let them, the gift giving would spiral out to everyone they know. Through our church we adopt a family in the area that won’t have a Christmas because of job loss or other things. Then we get together with others and buy them presents and a Christmas meal.
Christmas is God’s gift to us through Jesus Christ, and we want to share that gift with others.
My goal is for all of our plans, games, and fun to come back to that last sentence. I want the kids to be encouraged and have fun, but in the end I want them to share what they’ve learned with others.
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