Whose Birthday? #15

A Simple Christmas

Christmas Story Listening

Choose two days of the week to be used as story nights during December. Then gather the family together on those evenings (8:00 p.m. is a good time) for dessert and stories. In the weeks before, invite everybody to collect, clip, or copy good Christmas pieces, Scriptures, poems, short stories, brief paragraphs, quotations, and even a few holiday riddles and jokes to spice things up. Place everyone's selections in a big glass bowl decorated with a bright red bow, then set the bowl on the coffee table. During your listening time, have each person draw one item to read aloud, just as families used to do before the days of television. Longer stories can be continued from evening to evening.

Recommended collections: Behold That Star
Excerpts from Christmas Reader, Christmas Sampler and Christmas Collection are availale free in Archives.

If you have a fireplace, use it to create a warm and cozy atmosphere. Or set a dozen glowing candles around the room. Seat your family in a semicircle. Serve hot chocolate, a holiday fruit bowl, or some other light, healthy holiday snack. Put on recordings of quiet Christmas carols as a relaxing backdrop for your time together. You are bound to feel warmed and united by the sharing and by your love for each other. Isn't that what everybody wants at Christmas?

One woman said that some of her happiest remembrances of growing up were the December evenings her family spent around the dining room table. Her dad would read the Christmas story from the Bible. Then the family would sit together, sharing a special silence, each engrossed in private reading of inspirational books, poems, or stories gathered by her mom from magazines or the public library. This woman noted that these quiet and warm experiences brought the peace of Christmas to their home.

Swap Party

Every household seems to own more items than it wants or needs, such as pictures, dishes, costume jewelry, clothing, etc. Have guests bring along several good usable items, unwrapped, to be displayed on a large table. Draw numbers to determine the order in which folks will get to select an item. Unclaimed treasures can be donated to a church-sponsored thrift shop, Goodwill, or the Salvation Army.

For more ideas, see the accompanying Advent-Christmas calendar.

From "A Simple Christmas: Hundreds of ways to bring Christ and joy back into Christmas, in the spirit of More-with-Less" by Alice Chapin. Reprinted by permission, Herald Press, Scottdale, PA

This page last updated 20 October 2012.

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