My Favorite Christmas Tradition

I hope you and yours had a great Thanksgiving. I know a lot of gatherings had to be virtual. But wasn’t it nice to quiet our lives for a bit, be with people we love, and count our blessings?

Now we get to move on to celebrating the Christmas season. If you were like many of us you got an early start by “maxing the Merry” long before Thanksgiving. It’s OK. We are all craving our old traditions as we approach the end of a very crazy 2020.

What are your favorite Christmas traditions? I’ve got a lot of them. Looking for Black Friday deals even though we don’t need anything, South Georgia Pecan’s Amaretto Pecans (I can eat a whole bag), Christmas Eve at my sister’s house, and many more.

This year we get to start a new tradition of going to Blairsville, Georgia to be with Jill’s family. Jill was born and raised in Sarasota, Florida and I was born and raised here so an escape to the mountains is an exciting adventure for us and our kids.

But, my favorite tradition was introduced to us by some friends a few years ago. We were discussing the commercialization of Christmas and how we could get our kids focused on Jesus’ birth rather than the gifts they might get.

Our friends recommended a book called “The Sparkle Box.” It is a great book that our kids love to read every year. It introduces the idea of giving gifts to Jesus over the holidays.

How can you give gifts to Jesus? We believe and the book proposes the idea of giving gifts to the people that Jesus would be giving to – those that are less fortunate. The book even comes with a little silver box you can put under the tree to collect remembrances of the gifts you gave to Jesus over the season.

Reading the book and seeing the sparkle box always helps us move our focus away from ourselves (at least a little) and towards what we can do for others. As we do stuff that we think would make Jesus proud we write it down so we can put it in the box.

On Christmas morning we open the sparkle box and remember the gifts we gave and the things we did as we celebrate Christ’s birth. (We try really hard to do this before the kids tear into their gifts!)

“The Sparkle Box” has become a great tradition for us. If you’d like to start a similar tradition with your children or grandchildren, I highly suggest getting a copy of the book. You can find it on Amazon.