Celebrating a Christ-Centered Christmas

This December, we won’t be doing any regular challenges here on the TIMC—LDS.  We’re going to just do one challenge, and I’d love it if we could get lots of you involved! 

I’m calling it
“Celebrating a Christ-Centered Christmas”. 

Here’s how you can help and get involved:

1.  Think of one thing you do with your family to help you remember Christ during this busy season.

2.  Record it in your own way.  (Write it down, video it, scrapbook it, etc.)

3.  Email me (emils24(at)gmail(dot)com), or leave a comment here with your recorded challenge.

4.  Check back on the blog at least once a week during December to see how other families focus on Christ, and be inspired by the ideas of others, and maybe even try a few of them out!

5.  Spread the word to your family and friends, so they can benefit from this too!

I will link all of the future posts about it right here, so you can just check here if you’d like!

So, who’s in?

Challenge #13—Tradition

With the holidays just around the corner, I have been thinking more and more about traditions, but not just holiday traditions.  I have been thinking about the every day things that I am doing with my family to help build that special bond!

What are some of your every day traditions?

This may seem like a silly question at first.  If you’re like me, your first thought is, “I don’t have any traditions”.  But when I really stopped to think about it, I started seeing traditions that were never really meant to become traditions, but they have! 

You can do this challenge any way you want to.  Focus on one tradition and take pictures about it and write the details down.  Make a list of some of your day to day traditions.  You can start a list on a piece of paper and keep it close, so you can write down things as they come to mind.  Make a scrapbook layout, or even get the video camera out and take a video of one or more traditions! 

Get your family involved on this one!  You can do your immediate family and/or your extended family! 

_________
Some of our everyday traditions:

• Reading time with the kids after lunch.
• Our night-time routine (Dinner, clean up, scriptures, play, PJ’s, brush teeth, sing songs, say family prayer, kids in bed).
• Family Home Evening every Monday night.
• Asking my kids how their day at school was.
• Helping my kids with homework.
• One on one time with my kids to talk about their day.
• Going to “town” on Saturdays to run errands together.  (And sometimes dinner or lunch at Café Rio.)
• Dinner as a family every night. (With a few rare exceptions.)

Extended Family Birthday Traditions (with my hubby’s family):

• Girl’s Night Out (or day out) for birthdays of me, my SIL’s and MIL.
• Birthday dinners at my in-laws house on the Sunday before or after birthdays.  Usually we celebrate the closest birthdays. 

Things I’d like to improve on:

• Everyone recite the best and worst part of their day at dinner time. (To do more family talking at the dinner table.)
• Telling bedtime stories to the boys.  (I used to be really good at these made-up characters named Red, Blue, Yellow and Green.  They did things that my boys liked to do and learned lessons that my boys needed to.  Really need to do this every night!)

_______________

Now I challenge you to record some of your every day traditions!