Keeping the Meaning of the Season in Gift Giving

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I love Christmas! What a fun and joyful season. After we celebrated our oldest son’s 1st Christmas (where he was spoiled rotten by us and every other member of our family) My husband and I  knew that we needed to figure out a way to keep the meaning of the season as our focus as we celebrated each year. We want our children to grow up knowing and understanding the real reason we celebrate Christmas. I am happy to share with you a few of  the ideas that work best for us!

3 Gifts

We want both of our boys to know that Christmas is about celebrating Jesus’s birthday and really wanted to somehow incorporate that thought into our gift giving. A couple years ago, I saw an idea on a blog that perfectly aligned with what we were trying to teach! The idea is that each child receives 3 gifts from us to represent the 3 gifts that Jesus received from the Wise Men. With our kids being so young they do not totally understand the whole correlation just yet, but we hope as we talk about it every year they will understand more and more. I have shared this idea with a few friends who now do the 3 gifts in their home as well.

The Importance of Giving

We also use the season to teach the importance of giving to other people. We went and bought sheets for a special mission project our church was doing at a homeless shelter, we have Drake put change in the Salvation Army red buckets,  Drake and I went shopping and packed a box for Operation Christmas child and we plan on donating food to the local food pantry.

Santa

Santa does stop by our house every Christmas Eve, but he only brings each boy one present and fills their stockings with small items. Santa is such a fun and magical part of Christmas, but we don’t want our boys growing up thinking Christmas= Santa.  By limiting the gifts Santa brings we have found that it is easier to focus on the true meaning of Christmas while still enjoying the excitement that comes with Santa.

I hope you were able to take away some ideas from this post to help make the holidays more meaningful for your own family!

How do you plan on  focusing on the meaning of the season at your home this year as you give gifts?

3 COMMENTS

  1. I’m so glad you posted about the importance of keeping the true meaning of Christmas at the forefront of our celebrations. One way we have done this is that each year before we open gifts as a family, we gather around the Christmas tree while Travis reads the story of Jesus’ birth, either from the Bible or from a great children’s book called The First Christmas by Carol Heyer.

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