Parenting: Refresh Your Family Traditions

Five Family Traditions to Try This Holiday Season

Are you looking for new ways to bring life and meaning to your family’s Christmas this year? Commercialism and secularism drive much of our Christmas agendas, you may feel like it’s time to push away the clutter to get to a more meaningful Christmas.

How do you push past all the ‘noise’ and find a Christ-centered, simpler holiday season?  Is your celebration of the season Jesus or something else? How do you make the Christmas season mean something deeper for your family? These are all wonderful things to long for and seek out–and things we at Doing Family Right have sought out over the years too! This is where we’ve compiled a simple list of ways to make the season truly matter and have God at the Centre this Christmas. Are you ready? Let’s take your holiday traditions and give them a refresher!

Open your Home

Open your Home and have a party. Celebrate Christmas with friends and family by opening up your home to them. But let’s take this classic tradition deeper:  Party with a purpose by aiming for a deeper, God-honoring connection with your company. Have every guest come prepared for their moment in the Christmas spotlight by being ready to answer these three questions. Depending on the size of your group, ask someone every 20 minutes for their 3-minute response.

• What is your favorite Christmas memory as a kid growing up?
• The gift I enjoyed giving the most in my life was…
• What two-three things would you like to thank God for this Christmas?

As a final end note to your party, we’ve found that having a group prayer time thanking the Lord for the difference He makes in your lives and homes is the perfect note to end on!

Open your Door

Open your Door and get outside and moving as a family unit.  The cold might deter you, but we encourage you to push through and find a way to connect with one another through the simple beauty of nature and being outside. A few of the favourites we’ve done over the years:

• Create a Christmas scavenger hunt, a car rally or a photo hunt in teams.
• Find a place to go public skating or tobogganing (subject to location and climate of course).
• Go carolling in your neighbourhood.
• Attend a Christmas production
• Take a sleigh ride
• Build a snowman
• Have a snowball fight
• Take a hike or go for a walk around your home

Find any way to do something in God’s great outdoors and don’t forget to thank Him for the fun that follows.

Open your Table

Open your Table and welcome a guest. As many of us recall,  having people from outside our family over for Christmas dinner was what everybody did…but at some point, we stopped doing it. Perhaps it’s time to reintroduce this age-old tradition. It was the Currie norm for as long as I can remember. Once married, we embraced this practice and at least two-thirds of our Christmas days have included people who would otherwise be alone at this time. Why not ask your family whom they would like to love in this special way at Christmas? It might be a single mom and her kids, a widow, a student not going home or someone from a broken family. Share your table and in so doing, reflect the love of God this season.

Open your Wallet

Open your Wallet and give generously. This season always has its challenges financially, but hold to the truth: It’s better to give than receive. And in an effort to simplify and slow down this holiday season, wouldn’t less of us and more of Him make a big difference?  I challenge you to decide as a family on a great way to make a difference in this world. Maybe do a bottle drive for your cause to allow the kids to be more involved. Consider buying an extra turkey to drop off to a family less fortunate than yours. Why not sponsor a child through World Vision or Compassion? Find a worthy, non-profit charity that is really making a difference and give them a year-end gift. Look for some way to leave your mark as a family – God’s fingerprint through you.

Open your Heart

Open your Heart and let Christmas sink in. What was the Lord thinking when He sent Jesus to this world? What was He trying to say to us? Find time to pull away by yourself and relish in God’s amazing love for you in giving the greatest gift ever given. “For unto us a child is born. Unto us a son is given” – The great joy for all mankind is over the realization that Jesus came to reconcile us to God. Remarkable. Read the account of God reaching out to us in 3 or 4 different Bible versions (Luke 2). Then read the story of His birth before you open presents regardless of the age of your kids. Consider helping them to act it out. If you have younger children, one tradition we’ve embraced during those little years is singing  “Happy Birthday to Jesus”.

I’d love to hear how you are keeping your faith alive and well this Christmas. Maybe one of YOUR suggestions will be the new activity to become a tradition in the Currie home this year. Merry Christmas to you and your family and God’s blessings into the new year.

© Dr. Dave Currie – November 2014 updated November 2023