Christ: The Real Gift of Christmas

Have you found this website yet?

It is an incredible resource for your Christmas preparations!

You may download beautiful Christmas music under the "Christmas Resources" tab.

OR you may want to share the Christmas Videos with your family.

There are coloring pages and tradition ideas as well.

Here is a video I enjoyed today. I love that President Monson says we should focus on people, not things. It's about love and giving, not the actual gifts.

Christmas Devotional

Last night was the annual Christmas devotional for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You can watch the entire broadcast online. It is full of wonderful Christmas messages and beautiful music by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. A great way to invite the Spirit of Christmas into your home.

Messenger and Advocate has posted some beautiful shots of the Christmas lights at Temple Square.

LDS Publisher's Christmas Story Contest

LDS Publisher is a blog "dedicated to helping LDS authors successfully navigate the LDS publishing world". They are currently holding their Christmas Story Contest. The submittions are in and now the voting is open. I haven't had a chance to read all of them, but I have enjoyed the ones I have read. Some of the stories are just fun and others are very touching.

Gifts for the Savior

Source

Gift giving has become a big part of Christmas tradition, so much so that we can sometimes forget the reason for the season.

While we are plotting and planning what gifts to give our family and friends we could also include some gifts for our Savior on the list.

About.com has a list of Top 10 Spiritual Gifts to Give the Savior.

These are gifts that are not only meaningful at this time of year, but the whole year through and an eternity to come.

More Christmas Stories

About.com: Latter-day Saints also has a long list of Christmas stories for all ages, many pulled from church magazines.

FHE Nativity Game

About.com has a Family Home Evening Nativity Game complete with files to print off the cards either in color or b/w. It's Go fish game using pictures from the nativity including the baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the angel, shepherds, wise-men, and more.

Christmas in the Book of Mormon FHE

Chocolate on my Cranium does a weekly FHE post. The one for this week is Christmas in the Book of Mormon. The Family Home Evening lesson includes scriptures, pictures, and maps along with other materials.

Living Christ Christmas Tree

TJ Hirst on her blog Illuminate Everyday is sharing the special symbolism of the ornaments on her Living Christ Christmas Tree in a series of posts.

She explains:

"I chose each ornament for our tree to symbolize a particular aspect of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ from The Living Christ. Some are well-known symbols like doves for peace, but others represent my own associations and creativity."

The series will continue on Wednesdays until Christmas. You can move from the beginning post to the next ones by clicking on "Next in the Series", which is at the bottom right hand corner of each post.

Pictures used with permission

Christmas Music

I look forward every year to Christmas music. It is the one time of the year that I have music playing most of the time. I love the spirit of the music and the memories that come with it. Every year I add another CD to my collection.

This year I discovered Pandora. It is a commercial free internet radio that allows you to customize your "channel" to your likes and dislikes. You are able to type in the artists or songs you like and they will play music that is similar. Today I made myself a Holiday channel by typing in Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Sarah McLauchlan, Josh Groban, Amy Grant, etc and selecting their holiday version. Now all I have to do is turn up the volume on my computer and I can have a wide array of Christmas music wafting through my house.

Handel's Messiah is another all time favorite of mine. The spirit of that music is unlike any other. There is a book availible that tells the story behind Handel's Christmas music.

Teach a Christmas hymn to your family that they do not already know and sing it together in the weeks leading up to Christmas.

We have had so much fun having a special evening set aside to share Christmas music that we sing or play on different instruments. We love playing Christmas music on the bells, flute, violin, cello, harp, trumpet guitar, and piano. It is never perfect and it is a good thing that all the windows are shut so no one else can hear, but it is a lot of fun.

We have felt so blessed when a group is out caroling and comes to our door to sing a beautiful carol to us. How wonderful it would be to go and sing to someone in a nursing home or hospital.

We have some friends that have a Christmas tradition of have having families come over and gather around their piano and sing Christmas carols together and share goodies. It is a great way to share in the friendship and music of the season.

Make it a tradition to go to local Christmas concerts even if it is just supporting the highschool band.

Bread of Life Gift Tags

Everyday Food Storage has a post about doing homemade bread for neighbor gifts. She has made darling tags you can print to go with the bread using the scripture John 6:35:

"And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: 
he that cometh to me shall never hunger; 
and he that believeth on me shall never thirst." 

Homemade Gifts

Every year the ugliness of commercialism becomes more prevelant. We simply do not watch TV and thus don't have to see all of the commercials. Catalogs are thrown out. One way to help us focus more on giving is to make homemade gifts. I remember my family doing this as a child and those are the presents that I actually remember. With a little bit of encouragement, children are so very good at giving of themselves.

There are many blogs and websites that do homemade Christmas gift idas. Some of the major blogs do a special series of posts this time of year dedicated to homemade gifts. One such blog is Sew, Mama, Sew. They are doing their 2nd anual Handmade Holidays. Every day in Novemeber they are posting gift ideas focused on people who might be on your gift list ie. college student, grandparents, gift exchanges, teachers, pet lovers etc. (They did this last year and there is a link to those posts. This years are all supposedly all new ideas). Seeming as we are nearing the end of November there are quite a few posts filled with ideas.

I will add a link list for those blogs I find that are posting about homemade gifts. Don't be afraid to be creative and get your kids in on the action.

Please comment if you have any ideas to share or have found blogs with good ideas.

Christmas Articles from LDS Living

My sister-in-law was kind enough to point out that in the current issue of LDS Living there are multiple articles about having an organized and spiritual Christmas season. Unfortunately they have drastically limited the availibility of these articles online (I don't know if you can just buy the current issue somewhere in Utah without subscribing. It looks like they put full issues up online, but the one up there currently is the May/June issue- not helpful).

I have linked a couple articles I was able to find.

Some Lessons Learned by Lloyd and Karmel Newell
Simple Gift Ideas by Heather Holm
Simplifying the Christmas Season by Dawn Frandsen

A true story of Christmas service: Circle of Love by Janet Peterson
FHE Plan: Christmas
FHE Plan: Appreciating the Spirit of Christmas Music