A Spoonful of Sugar: November 2017

Christmas is my favorite time of the year. I love the lights, the garland, the Christmas music, the anticipation my kids have, but I especially love how easy it is to talk about Jesus during this season. After all, he is the birthday boy! We use his birthday as an opportunity to talk about him even more frequently. When we see Christmas lights, we talk about how people are decorating for Jesus's birthday like we decorate for our birthday with streamers and balloons. When we give gifts, we talk about how the wise man gave gifts to Jesus all those years ago and how Jesus is the greatest gift ever. And we love making and eating Jesus's birthday cake for dessert on Christmas day. Zachary has told me, "Jesus won't mind if we eat his cake." We want to make sure that we really focus on what we are celebrating. It is so easy to get caught up in the Black Friday sales, shopping, Christmas lists and eating sweets. None of those things are bad, but we need to make sure we are always shifting the focus back to Jesus.

One way that we do that with our kids is by telling them about God's big love and the how that theme is strung all the way through the Bible. Last year I wrote out 25 short, kid-friendly Bible stories that start at Genesis and go all the way to Revelation. Each day, we open a box from our advent calendar, eat a piece of chocolate (the kid's favorite part) and read the story that goes with that day. Then we hang an ornament that I made that depicts an image from that story. It was pretty successful last year and with the kids being a year older, I am excited to see how it will go this year.

A sweet mama reached out to me and asked if I would tell her how I made my ornaments, but since I made up my own pictures and patterns, I wasn't able to give her a whole lot of direction. I decided to trace out the patterns and write out instructions for each ornament. I thought I would post them to my blog in case anyone would like to make these ornaments as well. Please know, this is a very easy task. I have never sewn anything like this before I started this project, so don't be intimated. You can do it! I am hoping that this will be a meaningful family tradition and bonus point for the fact that they are durable heirlooms.

I am also reposting the stories because last year I found a few typos and I also wanted to adjust the font to make it look more attractive. I tried to format the pages so that the stories would take up only half of a page. My plan is to reprint them on card stock and then use pretty scrapbook paper for a background.

May you and your family have a blessed Christmas season and know how deeply loved by our Savior who we get to celebrate this time of year.