I'm hoping to crank out a few posts on here in the next couple of days...we'll see.
We had decided back when we knew we were pregnant that we weren't going to be traveling anywhere for the holidays. 10+ hour trips are interesting enough with two boys and adding the uncomfortability of being pregnant was less than appealing to both of us.
We welcomed our family down to our neck of the woods but as it turned out for Christmas day it was just out family. Some good friends of ours were in the same boat and so we invited them over for the day of.
Knowing that we were going to be spending the holidays with any packing to do, or wrapping more intensive than what would survive shipping, we decided to put that time to better use.
Josh is getting to the age to where he is easily engulfed in the materialism of the world, much to my dismay. Hearing talk of the upcoming holidays and how it mainly surrounded presents we wanted to give things a different focus. This is always our goal, but we took some extra steps this year to help avoid it.
We wanted to step out and do something that I'm sure seemed a bit crazy to everyone else. Having both lived in another country and being been in areas that are less than comfortable we both believe fairly strongly that there's only so much you can teach someone about the rest of the world, and beyond that they have to see. We both though Josh was getting old enough where he could handle, and even benefit from seeing.
Some friends of ours have a parking lot they know of that always has a lot of homeless people in it. Each year they gather as many coats as they can and take it down. After hearing her talk about it, I thought it would be neat if we could pack a ton of sack lunches and head down there with them. Kids in tow, Josh helping hand them out.
After some bumps and divine guidance we ended up on street corner passing out jackets and lunches. We had a ton of coats and over 100 lunches and passed out all but a couple of coats. Josh was out there with us for about half an hour handing the lunches to the people.
It was so rewarding. As serving always is, but we've never gotten to do it as a family before and invest in our kids this way, and there just aren't words.
Now let me say the day did not go perfectly by any means. Jack was crying in the car for about a half an hour because he needed to poop but didn't want to. Josh was only outside for half an hour and then spent the rest of it wreaking havoc on our car. I was on high alert the entire time as I saw people shooting up just across the road and people walking very close to our car with a DVD player in it and my two children.
But it was SO worth it. We were talking and processing things on the way home asking Josh what he thought about all of it. I asked him is he was scared at any point, and he didn't seem to understand. He asked what he would be scared of. Even though we had explained to him before hand that not all of these people were nice people and he needed to be careful and stay by mom and dad, he still viewed them as just people. Not good or bad, just people we were supposed to help. He had also spent a good five minutes chatting with one guy in particular named Jeff. He started praying for him that night.
We did Operation Christmas child and both the boys helped pack a box for two boys similar in age. My small group of women also got the opportunity to go serve at a processing facilities so I got the tell the boys about that as well.
Chris's work did a food drive and we had both of the boys help us pick out food for that. Chris was also able to help get a bunch of extra coats for when we went downtown form his work.
Also when we sent out Christmas lists we asked everyone to refrain from getting us toys. And more importantly they listened : ) That was huge right there. There was still plenty he was thrilled about (most of even more so than toys that typically get tossed aside a few days later) and he got money and gift cards which he enjoyed and was a huge blessing to us. So far we've gotten the boys the last of what they needed clothes wise for winter and enrolled Josh for baseball all on someone else's dime, and had a couple of fun family nights out at Chick-Fil-A.
Finally we controlled the tone of the day. We went to a Christmas Eve service and a surprise blessing was that kids Josh's age and up stayed in and listened. We're still having conversations off of what he heard that night. Because we were out late the boys slept in a bit and we got up and instead of diving right into presents we sat down to breakfast together. While we were eating we read the Christmas story from our bible and the boys childrens bible (Jesus Storybook bible, SO GOOD!). And then we talked about it, and what that meant for us. We finally got around to stockings and presents and took our time with those as well. The day allowed more time for reflection and capturing the moments. It was wonderful.
We missed having family around on Christmas, however we've learned that some of those times can be a blessing in disguise allowing us to become more established in our own traditions and control more of the focus that we choose to be important for the day. As much as we missed having family around we were thankful to have more time and capability to be more focused on communicating what the day was about to our kids.
So that was Christmas. I think Josh in particular learned a lot from our unrelenting discussions and inclusions in serving. Hopefully we will get a chance to do some of the same things next year!
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