Tradition #9 - Sugar Cookies
I feel like we try a new recipe every year. They're usually family recipes and this year we found another yummy one from Grandma Richins. The kids love cutting out the shapes and helping with the icing.
Tradition #10 - Christmas Eve Dinner
This has been everything from ham, turkey, roast to a dinner of appetizers, and this year we're going to try fondue. We usually light candles and this is where we each receive our ornaments for the year.
Tradition #11 - Bingo!
This is from my family and is a fun way to win prizes or, better still, money. For some reason our markers are always red hots. That may be one I'll have to change since it's a bit disturbing seeing kids sneak the heavily-handled candies. We do a number of rounds and the stakes get higher with the more difficult challenges. The hope is that everyone will win at least once.
Tradition #12 - Luke 2 & One Gift
Dad reads from the Bible. It's peaceful hearing the words while watching our own children and sitting near the nativity scenes. We open the presents from our family gift exchange on Christmas Eve. It's fun to see what everyone thought up and created. We'll get our gifts for the Savior ready for the morning and everyone tries to get some sleep!
We had General Conference last weekend and during the previous week, we had visiting family. My sister prepared this activity for a joint Family Home Evening for all the kids. It was so fun for my family last weekend - the kids really anticipated watching since each time an apostle or the prophet spoke, they got to open and eat the corresponding candy bar. Here's the link at lds.about.com for the wrappers. We'll definitely be doing this again. It was a big hit.
We had a nice time together listening to a talk from Elder Ballard from the October 2012 General Conference. You can read or listen to the talk here. He asked at the end that we spend time in our morning prayers asking to be guided by God as to how to serve one of his children that day. We were asked recently by our bishop to do the same thing. So that is on each of our individual goals list for 2013.
To help us remember our morning prayers and goal, we borrowed an idea from a past issue of The Friend magazine and made prayer rocks. We collected, washed, and dried some rocks then painted them in bright colors so they would catch our attention each day. Every morning we say our prayer then put the rock on our pillows. Then each evening as we take the rock off, we are reminded to say our nightly prayer. We place it near the bed or somewhere we will easily see it so we will be reminded to say our morning prayer the following day and put it back on our pillow.
Some evenings at dinner - when we remember - we talk about any opportunities we've had for service that day. Hopefully I'll be able to report more as we keep it up.
We had a Young Women activity a few weeks...months? ago where we made temple blocks. We painted these wooden blocks and then mod podged pictures of the temple on top. This was a great activity since it helped us follow the counsel for each child in the church to have a picture of a temple in their room. With all my recent cleaning out, I finally completed the one I started. I got the picture and followed the instructions from this blog: LilLuna.com
We are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Girls ages 12-18 meet together as Young Women in our church. Right now I volunteer service as a leader in this group and we meet each Sunday as part of our worship service and once each week for activities. This is an example of what we might do in the hour or so we have together during that midweek evening.
Using the tutorial at this site and then researching images of historic oil lamps on google, I took this project to Young Women's and we sculpted our lamps. After visiting for a bit we started discussing the meaning of the parable of the Ten Virgins found in Matthew chapter 25 in the New Testament. We put them in for baking and then watched this video from lds.org while we waited the fifteen minutes for them to finish.
It's a great project and the lamps really work!
