Christmas 2016

We knew in September that our theme for Christmas this year was going to be 'Charity Never Faileth'.  Beginning in mid-October, I started committing 15 minutes a day to working on ideas and plans to make it happen in a fun meaningful way for all.  It truly was amazing to see things come together in such an incredible way.  I know the ideas were inspired and doing this has blessed our family so much.

We started our study of charity 26 days before Christmas.  We took the 13 strands of charity as listed in Moroni 7:45 and studied each one separately. What does it mean in real life situations to not be puffed up or to not think evil or to hope all things (etc.)?  Every other morning we would have a devotional discussing what that day's strand meant and then we would act on that strand.  The next day we would report on what we experienced.  We recorded our experiences and sent them to our BYU students to involve them as well (they also received our devotional notes so they could participate).  This was a wonderful thing to do and made such a difference for all of us.  {NOTE:  this does not mean perfect!!!  We still had the same number of melt downs, disagreements etc, that happen in a normal imperfect family such as ours...but it gave us dialogue to evaluate ourselves and recognize small new ways of thinking to help us solve those problems that arise. That was where we found the most remarkable experiences.}  Each day we added a strand we added a word strip to our pantry door to remind us what we were working on.

On Christmas day we played a game called OPERATION CHARITY to help us wrap up what we had worked on during the month.  (It was just like regular the Operation game with an altered board, but with a few twists and turns...)

The basics: when you are spiritually sick from lack of charity, you need to remove the ailment by applying charity to get back to full spiritual health again.  As we learned throughout the month, you can try to act with charity using only your own self discipline and you will make some gains, but unless you involve Jesus Christ's divine help, living such a high standard is impossible.  This was a lesson we wanted to drive home with the game.  

We remade cards, money and several game board pieces.

PS...I'm publishing things way behind the times!!!  So this post isn't finished, but it is better than nothing. 😏