Christmas Traditions: Presents

"And going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshipped Him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gold, frankincense, and myrrh." ~Matthew 2:11


Do you remember your favorite Christmas present that you got when you were a kid? That special Christmas morning when you came downstairs and saw all those lovely packages and tore through them and found the thing you were longing for. I got that feeling a lot growing up. I remember being so excited when I ran downstairs and discovered the most beautiful Cornsilk Cabbage Patch kid, with a stroller! She was so pretty my sister kept trying to steal her and give me hers. Haha! I remember being so happy at the sight of a shiny new 10-speed. Silver with white curled handlebars. So sleek and cool and grown up. And then the year that I got a SWATCH watch and a SWATCH phone! With my OWN phone line-my OWN personal phone number! Woo-Hoo!! I was SO happy that year! My parents always made sure that our Christmas morning was a fabulous time full of fun and presents and they made us so happy! And the envy of all our friends, usually! :)


I LOVE presents. Getting. Giving. Whatever. But Christmas presents are the best because there are so many. But sometimes that makes it the worst too. It can be hard to remember that it's Jesus' birthday when we get so focused on all the hoopla. Especially for a kid. So we have a couple of traditions that we do to try to keep Jesus the focus of our celebration and still give our kids the types of excited and overwhelmingly happy Christmas mornings I got to experience!

The purpose of exchanging gifts. Every year we talk to our kids about why we give gifts. The answer is always that we give each other gifts because God gave us the greatest gift-Jesus! And since everything is His, we bless each other with gifts to celebrate.

3 Gifts: Jesus got 3 recorded gifts in Scripture at his birth- gold, frankincense, myrrh. So, we give our kids 3 gifts, too. If that sounds like a little amount, it is. But it's 3 things they really want. This ties the presents back into the birth story and helps make the presents more about celebrating Jesus than celebrating selfishness and greed for MORE, MORE, MORE! And because they know they only get 3 gifts, we ask them to tell us what things they really want. They also get a "brother gift" from each other although soon we'll have the kids pick a name and buy each other a gift. This helps them think not only about themselves, but also about what their siblings would like. They get stockings full of little stuff, plenty gifts from grandparents and family too!

Santa=no. We don't celebrate him. Never have. I know some parents love it but I don't get why. I think it's crazy to lie so excessively to kids and it takes the focus off the real meaning of Christmas for me. I know it's fun and make-believe (which is what we tell our kids) but I don't make my kids believe in Aslan or SpongeBob or agree that they're real if their friends say so. I could go on and on but I won't because if you "do" Santa I'm sure you've thought through the consequences and if you don't...good! Haha! But  please don't let your kids talk to mine about Santa because my middle son LOVES to tell kids that he isn't real! :) (he's not allowed to bring it up but if someone else does...)

Giving gifts to others. This is a tradition we have done for a few years. We have donated to Samaritan’s Purse, Toys for Tots, Angel Tree. This year we are donating toys and medicine to Kids Who Care Globally through the boys’ school.

Jesus' birthday gift. This is a new tradition this year. A few weeks ago I was talking to the kids and they were telling me what they wanted for Christmas. I asked them what Jesus wanted since it's HIS birthday. One Son said, "our hearts". I wanted to come up with a tangible way we could give Jesus our hearts this Christmas. Inspired by Noelle Piper's book, Treasuring God in Our Traditions. (Click on the link and you can download the book for free! The Piper's are SO generous!) I decided that we could give Him something this Christmas. We have a lovely wrapped gift on our coffee table. But it's an empty box and there is a hole on the bottom. All through the Christmas season, we can write things that we want to give to Jesus, give-up for Jesus, put in money, whatever is evidence of his grace in our life we see so we can acknowledge it as his gift to us and give it back to Him. Some examples might be: Doing someone's chore as a way to bless them for Jesus, feeling selfish and angry but praying instead of sinning and writing down that evidence of grace, not buying a treat but using that money to donate to a charity or our church, etc. On Christmas, we'll go through the box together. I'm not sure how it will go since this is a new thing but I'm hoping it becomes a tradition that we look forward to!

What traditions do you have with your presents at Christmas?