25 Days of Christmas

Merry Christmas from the Dyers!

We hope you have had a blessed Christmas and were able to celebrate the reason for this joyous season-the birth of Jesus, our Savior!

Christmas is an anticipation of the coming of Christ, not only His birth, but what follows-His death and resurrection! Christ gave His life for us. God gave us His son to redeem us.

Because of this, we want to teach our daughter about giving in this Christmas season. We always want to teach her about the Bible and especially about loving others. This Christmas, we taught her about loving others through giving and through kindness.

Many of you have asked and commented about pictures you have seen of her this Christmas, so I thought I would share our idea of our 25 Days of Kindness.

Parents Caution: Santa Spoiler…Our friend Kris, who we are living with in this time of transition, actually got the idea started, so the credit goes to her for this idea. I did not come up with idea on my own. It was mostly because of her that I decided to do the 25 Days of Kindness. She saw an idea called “Kindness Elves” and wanted to do it with Sharles. I thought and debated about it for a while because we don’t do Santa at our house. We have always said we never want to lie to our kids, even if the truth is hard to tell them. Not to mention, how confusing is Santa? You give a man in a red suit all the characteristics of God and let him take over for a month…well, that’s a different blog all together (maybe another time)! Anyway, the idea of an elf didn’t sit well with me since it related to Santa, and since it was a made-up character too! So we just decided to use her toys to help her find her hearts we created each day.

So once we decided on the idea of the 25 Days of Kindness, I came up with a list of several different things we could do to be kind, share and show love to others. Some involved costs and others did not. I will share some of the things we did later in the post! Each day, I wrote what we were doing on heart, so she would know what she was looking for and put them with one of her stuffed animals or toys, so they would be easier to find. I also added Bible verses on some of them to correspond with what we were doing that day. I put them out in plain sight where she could find them every morning. If I had something that corresponded with the day’s activity, I went ahead and put it with the heart and stuffed animal. Also, if I had a stuffed animal that went with the activity, I I tried to use it too. For example, the first day, we made cookies for the neighbors, so I used a Nutcracker with serving tray to hold her heart and sat it beside a mixing bowl with cookie mix and a spoon in it. She got so excited when she found her hearts and would tell me, “Mommy, read it!” We both had fun doing the activities daily!

We hope this encourages you to start new traditions with your children to teach them about the true meaning of Christmas and develop Christ-like qualities in your child, such as loving others. Our main objective in raising our children is to do just as Christ told us-to love God and love others.

I hope you enjoy our ideas and pictures and be sure to share your own too! We will likely continue this tradition next year, so if you have any other ideas, please share them, and we will add them to our list. We also plan on continuing this tradition throughout the year. Maybe not as frequently, but we will definitely continue giving to others throughout the year and making sure they know we love them.

My intention with this post is not gain personal glory in sharing our ideas. I have had several comments about this idea, so I thought I would share it here. My goal is to glorify God in all I do and raise my children to do the same!

Here are some ideas and pictures of the things we have done for the 25 Days of Christmas!

Make cookies and share them with the neighbors
Call a friend to say “Hello!”
Write a note to a friend, who is sick
Leave a note for the mail carrier
Make a card for someone you love
Donate treats to the animal shelter
Donate food from the pantry to the Rescue Mission
Make treats to share with our friends at school
Send a care package to someone
Donate coins from your piggy bank to an organization
Bake cookies and donate them to an organization
Support a family in need
Donate some clothes that don’t fit anymore to a friend
Put a dollar on a Dollar Store toy, so someone else can buy a toy
Make a Christmas treat for our family
Read the story of the birth of Jesus to someone

Merry Christmas!