December 13, 2011

• Rethinking Christmas

  I’ve spent a good chunk of this year de-cluttering and simplifying my home. It’s been freeing to part with a porch full of stuff…stuff I don’t even miss, and frankly can’t remember what it was we got rid of. I look at certain areas of my house and think, “I could get more aggressive in de-cluttering this stuff.”

  So as we get closer and closer to Christmas I knew I wanted to be intentional about what gets brought into our home. John and I are blessed with parents who don’t go overboard!! My parents gave us a trip to Wisconsin Dells at Thanksgiving for Christmas, and John’s parents buy one simple gift for each boy and a pair of homemade slippers! What a blessing that is to us! I pray that it shows my boys that Christmas isn’t about a pile of gifts to tear into and hardly even take time to enjoy.

   But this year my mind has been swirling with ways to do Christmas different and I didn’t even know what that meant, but two things came across my path. 

  1) Revive our Hearts did a three day series on: Making Christmas More Meaningful

  2) A Holy Experience blogged: When Christmas Gets Radical: Who’s Birthday is it anyway?

  Both of these have challenged me deeply to rethink Christmas…for this year, but especially for next year because we do all our Christmas shopping pretty early in the year. We’ve already scaled back on Christmas for the boys, but to not just scale back but to give back to those who need it.

  I don’t know what this means for us in the years to come, but my hope is that when the boys are older they will see Christmas is more about giving to Jesus than filling their own wish list. I want them to be other-focused and Christ-centered, and shouldn’t Christmas be the best season to teach them this in a deeply powerful way?

   

  • 8:28 am
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