Christmas Spirit

We've started getting into the Christmas spirit around here! December is such a fun month that we start celebrating Christmas right away. Last week we took the boys on frontrunner to see the lights at Temple Square. The lights were, of course, magical. But the real highlight for the boys of course was frontrunner, Hudson almost refused to get off the train when we got to Salt Lake. It was a fabulous night!

We are starting another new family tradition this year. I have been trying to think of more ways to keep Christmas season focused on the Savior and less on presents and Santa- although that stuff is fun too. Ben and I have each participated in a few more grown up service activities, but I hadn't really come up with a way to extend that to the kids. A sweet friend told me about what they were doing with their young kids- an act of service a day until Christmas. Something small and something little ones can do. I loved the idea. Over the weekend I made up little cards with a specific act of service for each day. We had our family home evening lesson Monday night all about the Savior and how serving others is our gift to Him. I wish I could say that the spirit was there and that the kids totally got it- but they were both being totally crazy and silly during the lesson. But we are going to talk about it each day as we do our little act of service and hopefully over time the lesson will sink in. Our first day was leaving a Christmas treat for the mailman. We wrapped up some of these cute gingerbread men that Chase and I had made that day. The next day was taking a Christmas treat to a widow, so we used a few more of the gingerbread men to take to a widow on our street. 

 The day after that our service for the day was writing Christmas cards to the missionaries in our ward. The next day was making Christmas cards to mail to Chase's great-grandparents. We made a whole morning of it and Chase made 4 beautiful cards. I got brave and let him paint with a q-tip. Here he is making a snow scene (which we added a snowman to after it was dry) and then he decorated some darling Christmas trees with red paint and glitter. The finished products were SO CUTE! So I hope his great-grandparents enjoy them.

Here are their finished products-I'll bet you can guess which one was Chase's and which is Hudson's. Hudson sure was proud of his though! I kept these two to hang on my fridge, and I wish I had taken pictures of the Christmas tree ones before we sent them because they were darling as well.

Friday's service activity was making a Christmas treat to deliver to the fireman in Kaysville. Chase helped me make Christmas pretzels (meaning topping a pretzel with a hug or rolo and letting it melt in the over and then topping it with a red or green M&M). It was the perfect Christmas treat to make with a three year old- he could do so much of it himself and loved helping. While we did that Hudson helped by climbing on the counter to grab huge handfuls of pretzels and then worked on unloading all the kitchen cupboards and grabbing ornaments off the tree and throwing them on the floor. It was awesome. Chase went with me to deliver the treats to the fireman last night and he told them all about how he loves firetrucks and how he was a fireman for Halloween. It was very sweet. I am hoping Chase is getting the deeper lessons of service and Christlike love during this Christmas season. I've sure had fun working on these simple projects with my sweet boy!