Christmas Day Service

Every year after Thanksgiving I start dialogue with the kids something like this "This year Christmas is going to be different." I do that to help minimize complaints when I throw something new at them on Christmas day. I guarantee all along that they will like the day and I will do my best to make it fun for them, but it gives me a lot of freedom to try new and different things with them. (teenagers are not always conducive to changes in tradition, I've found.)

This year one of my ideas was to perform a service project on Christmas day---get out of the house in the middle of opening presents and think of someone else. The thoughts I had were to somehow "cheer and bless and brighten". But that was a hard thing if I wanted to involve everyone of my kids with the age span I've got (we couldn't very well all go and serve at the homeless shelter or something like that with our little ones.) The idea that kept coming back was to make a fresh potpourri (cut up oranges, apples, a handful of cranberries, cinnamon sticks, cloves) and deliver it to people. It seemed like kind of a corny idea, but it fit: everyone of them could help---even Tessa could put a handful of cranberries in a bag then help deliver, I wouldn't have to worry about germy hands or other hygiene issues and it wouldn't be terribly time consuming--which was important to me since this was so new to my family. I had in mind of going to a lower income area of town to deliver them, but I left it open so if the kids had an idea or inspiration we could go with that. We ended up in a trailer park for ages 55+. Everyone of us had our eyes opened to heartache. Many of these people were alone (of the 25 bags we delivered, 2 had family there). One lady was cooking herself some hot dogs for brunch (I guess that's what it would be as it was 10:30am. How sad is that?? ---she was very grateful for the potpourri to get rid of the hot dog smell!) And the conditions in their homes was depressing. Most of them we didn't talk to long--just delivered and wished them a merry Christmas, but I felt very strongly as we left that we definitely cheered and blessed and brightened.

At first we did have a little resistance to the whole idea, but at the end, most of the kids said it was the best part of the day. I will definitely be pondering this over the next year.