no.217 131203 Thank you for a special Christmas gift idea

Something I'd like to bake for Christmas.

I came across an article on desiringGod website yesterday. The title goes like this: "Five things to teach your children this Christmas." No, I'm not married and I don't have my own children, but I do have children that I teach at Sunday school. I want to keep these five points as we began advent a couple of days ago.

During the last discipleship class, the leader was sharing about how her family stopped exchanging Christmas presents with each other. Instead, they collected that money and purchased more meaningful gift through the Compassion website to help the needy in the poor countries. It was really cool that she brought it up during that particular meeting, because I was on the Compassion website just earlier that week, browsing gift options. Anyways, her family started the tradition since her son was in his sixth grade, which I think is amazing. It's certainly hard to compromise on presents with children. I remember praying so earnestly as a kid to get the toy I wanted for Christmas from Santa, and of course, I received another persent from my parents as well. Her son is now in his second year of university, so they've been doing it for a while. Since a couple of Christmases ago, God challenged me to see something beyond the Christmas lights, presents underneath the tree, and everything glittery in gold, red and green. Last year, I wanted to try something different, and that's when I began to think differently about how I spend my Christmas. I thought about what I could do on a Christmas morning. Sadly, I didn't put anything into action.

This year will be different. I'm gonna start a tradition this Christmas. Some of my friends from church gather together at the end of the year for a Christmas party. Yes it is fun exchanging gifts and all, but I thought it'd be really nice and special if we collected the money and make a donation on behalf of our group. There will be about 20 of us at the party I believe... and we're all bringing something upto $20 per person, which means we can raise $400, and we can give a real sweet gift to a family in Mexico. I suggested this idea to my friends on Sunday over lunch and not many people seemed to like my idea... I'm not surprised. It seems like they want to keep the secret santa portion of the party. Well, that is the fun part indeed. So I was thinking about other ideas to get my friends think participate in this. My next suggestion will be spending half on a gift and half on donation. What do you think? If not, then we will just have a donation box on the side... but I'm pretty positive this won't work. Perhaps it'll work better with my life group girls? If it doesn't work with both groups, then, I can do it with my family or even on my own I guess. Regardless, I'm really excited about this idea. I can't believe it took twenty something years for me to come up with this idea. Man, how stupid was I this whole time? I'm thankful that I'm a little bit wiser compared to last year:)