Christmas Card Prayers & 12 Days of Christmas

Two more fun Christmas traditions:

1. Christmas Card Prayers. I’m never quite sure what to do with Christmas cards when they come. I look, ooh and ahh, read the letter and so forth. But then what? I don’t have a little display thing, and I’ll admit, do not cover my refrigerator with them.  But I don’t want to throw them away and yet am not quite sure where they should go. So usually they go in a pile on top of my fridge until about mid-July when I find them, covered in dust, and then throw them away without guilt.  There must be a better way.

So this year we’ve been doing Christmas Card prayers.  Each day when I open a Christmas card or two I read them and then put it in the middle of our kitchen table. Then that night, when we do our family prayer time at dinner, we pray for the families, as specifically as we can, whose card we received that day.   I find that we’re a lot more likely to care and really pore over the cards and pics when we’re actually praying for them.

Then I’m keeping the cards in a little prayer box, and I plan to keep them in rotation throughout the year.  So when the flood of Christmas cards is over, we can still rotate through the fun pics of family and friends and lift them up to the Lord at dinnertime prayer.  Simple!

2. 12 Days of Christmas. I am SO excited to do this this year.  This idea was given to me by someone else who has done it for more than 25 years, every single year. Each year as a family you pick another family or couple or single person, perhaps who has gone through a hard time or could just use encouragement, or just whoever God places on your heart.  You secretly put a tiny gifts on their doorstep for the 12 days of Christmas (1 candle, then the next day 2 packets of hot cocoa, then the next day 3 of something, all the way to the 12th day giving them 12 of something like fresh cinnamon rolls on Christmas day). Each day you include a verse or something encouraging that goes along with the gift. Obviously the point is not to get complicated, but just to have fun thinking creatively about one other family and encourage them from God’s Word. It’s helpful to pick someone who lives near you since you’ll need to go by their house every day for 12 days!  For me it’s also probably a good idea to pick someone who doesn’t read this blog! 🙂  The person who shared this with me said that some years they reveal who they are and some years they keep it a secret, depending upon the situation.  Just a little idea to spark creativity as we learn to love our neighbors and celebrate the greatest gift–the Giver Himself.