8 Ways To Make Your Christmas More Christ-Centered
How to have a Christ-Centered Christmas with your family
The Christmas season can be very busy! It’s hard to juggle between family celebrations, school obligations, church celebrations, and extracurricular obligations. The focus on Christmas is not Christmas shopping, cookie baking, or even family, but only Christ Himself. Here are 8 ideas on making a Christ-Centered Christmas for you and your family.
How To Make Your Christmas More Christ-Centered
Get Your Family Involved in Ministry
This one can be through the local church, or just on your own.
Get your kids involved in a ministry that they feel they can take ownership of. Here’s some ideas of Christmas-related ministries they might get excited about.
Making Christmas care packages for the homeless in your area, complete with toiletries customized for women or men, and including a special Christmas gift
Volunteering through Salvation Army as bell ringers
Volunteering in a Homeless Shelter or Soup Kitchen
Packing a Shoebox and sending it through Operation Christmas Child
Participating in an Angel Tree Program
Visiting a local nursing home or care center with homemade gifts
Caroling with a local church
Community service projects, like cleaning up trash in the town square
Snow shoveling or de-icing sidewalks for widows in your church body
Pray as a family at meal times and bedtimes for people around the world to turn to Christ during this Christmas season
How To Make Your Christmas More Christ-Centered
Involve Your Family in a Local Body of Believers
Are you involved in a local body of believers? Don’t be an isolationist Christian who does everything in the home (unless you have a home church with other families… that is!)
Iron sharpens iron and we are meant to live in community with each other.
Christmas is an excellent time to get extra involved in all that the church has to offer this holiday season, from Christmas parties to advent celebrations, to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day services, and even New Year’s Eve Parties!
Some of my fondest memories of my childhood church involve holidays, and I want that to be true for my children as well!
For more on this: 9 Reasons You Need the Church
How To Make Your Christmas More Christ-Centered
Decorate Your House in a Way that Centers on Jesus
Maybe this means having a Nativity Set in your home. The kid-friendly ones (like this one from Melissa and Doug) are SO cute and are great for toddler hands who are super curious about each different character.
Or maybe it means having a Happy Birthday theme to your Christmas decorations all to honor Jesus. Our family has a Happy Birthday Jesus birthday cake and/or cookies to remind us of the real reason we are there.
How To Make Your Christmas More Christ-Centered
Read the Christmas Story From the Bible
Don’t you love the Charlie Brown Christmas special, where the spotlight turns on and all focus is turned on a reading from the Bible? On NATIONAL TELEVISION?!
This sudden (even if slight) regard for the Biblical story of Christ’s Redemption of mankind is one of the main reasons that I love Christmas time.
Turn the spotlight on the Christmas story in your home.
There are two Christmas accounts in the Bible:
Matthew Chapters 1 and 2 – Focuses more on the Wise Men (BibleGateway)
Luke Chapters 1 and 2 – Focuses more on the Shepherds (BibleGateway)
These are in New Living Translation which I find a little easier for children to understand, but any translation works! 🙂
How To Make Your Christmas More Christ-Centered
Read the Christmas Story From Christian Storybooks
There are some amazing Christian retellings of the Biblical Christmas story. I found some at Dollar Tree of all places, told through the eyes of a donkey in the barn, and through the eyes of a little lamb. Amazon also has some great storybooks if you’re like me and very interested in not leaving the home to go shopping with toddlers.
My caution with this is to check the publisher and/or read the content carefully. I was surprised to find the Dollar Tree books as Biblically sound. I’ve ran across books in Wal-mart or Target that seem to promote Jesus as a regular human, and not as God. I like it when books capitalize the name of Jesus, as well as all of the He and His that refer to Him. It makes a statement for the children that Jesus was special and noteworthy! It honors Christ and that’s what Christmas is supposed to be all about!
Here’s some Christmas books from publishers that I trust:
How To Make Your Christmas More Christ-Centered
Listen to Christmas Hymns and sing Christian Christmas Songs!
I wish more Christian children had Away In a Manger memorized and not as many had Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer memorized.
In my opinion: there’s nothing wrong with having fun with the Santa myths associated with Christmas as long as the children know that it’s for fun… and not the real focus of the Christmas season.
Kids LOVE to sing, and what they sing shapes their hearts! Try putting on some Christian-based Christmas songs while you are in the car or doing Christmas festivities in your home. They will find themselves singing along soon!
How To Make Your Christmas More Christ-Centered
Help Your Children Memorize Part of the Christmas Story
I was deeply impacted by the Youth Pastor at my Southern Baptist Church throughout my High School years. I remember coming back home to visit for the Christmas Eve Service and hearing my Youth Pastor’s Son recite from memory the Luke version of the Christmas story. He was probably 3.5 or 4 and I had no idea a child that young could recite even ONE verse, let alone the whole story.
Colossians 3:16 tells us to “let the word of Christ dwell in us richly.” Deuteronomy 6:4-9 tells us to bind God’s law on our foreheads, teach it to our children, talk about it wherever we go, and make it a central part of our everyday lives!
If your children don’t have any Bible verses memorized, Christmas is a GREAT time to start that new habit!
Here’s some Christmas themed verses they can memorize in one day of practice.
Christmas Scripture For Younger Kids To Memorize
Luke 2:11
“For today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”
Luke 1:14
“You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at His birth.
Matthew 2:10
“When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy.”
Luke 2:12
“This will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”
Christmas Scripture For Older Kids To Memorize
Matthew 1:21
“She will bear a Son; and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.”
Isaiah 9:6
“For a child will be born to us, a Son will be given to us; And the government will rest on His shoulders; And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.”
Luke 2:13-14
“And suddenly there appeared with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace among men with whom He is pleased.'”
Galatians 4:4-5
“But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons.”
How To Make Your Christmas More Christ-Centered
Help Your Children Give Away Some of Their Possessions as a Birthday Gift to Jesus
Ahh, the post-Christmas toy flood!
Do you have toy overwhelm as a mom? Your kids might have the same toy overwhelm, though few will admit that to you. Help guide them to give some of their toys to younger kids in your church, or a Christian consignment store or thrift store that benefits a Christian ministry in your area.
Make sure that your children understand that these toys can really bless other children and Jesus told us that we should love our neighbors as ourselves, and when we do that, we are ACTUALLY loving Jesus Himself!
In John 13:34, Jesus says:
“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.”
What about you?
Do you have any more ideas on how to make your Christmas more Christ-Centered? What do you think of these ideas?
