Raising Faith-Filled Kids:: 2

Nurturing Faith Discussions at Christmas Time

So I wrote recently about the Golden Compass and how most Christian communities/leaders are great at saying what is dangerous, leads to sin, and should be avoided, but not so verbose in terms of what is helpful, life-changing, and faith-forming - in particular for children & youth. So I'm going to try and do my part.

I talked before about the prayers of gratitude around our table - mostly for this or that Barbie - but at times different. Like last night, when my youngest daughter prayed, "I'm thankful for all the sick kids getting better in the hopsital."

One powerful thing in these pre-Christmas days of Advent is the story of Christmas itself. Increasingly our kids know about the Maccabees, the spelling and purpose of the word Solstice, and the days of Kwanzaa...and ironically more about Santa than the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.

We light the Advent wreath each night at dinner. We also have an Advent Calendar from our favorite play toy company (Playmobil) - ok it is consumeristic, but it helps us get excited, mark the time, and talk about the coming of Christmas. We open a box each morning - or whenever we are all together around the table that day. We light the wreath at night, a wreath that we've made with cuttings from our yard. It's more personal, real, and from the sacred space of our home. (Here's a picture) You can even include your children in the creation of it.

A wise and beloved Auntie of our family taught us a great thing in terms of a creche or nativity scene. She has her baby Jesus surf around her house, never appearing in the manger scene until Christmas day. We do that too now. Jesus cruising around our places, kinda like Joseph and Mary's journey to Bethlehem in a fun and funny way. We also have several different creches that we bring out at Christmas either from different toy companies (Playmobil, Little People), from beloved family members, or that we've collected from travels around the world (Mexico, Africa, and Europe). In playing with them our children discover, articulate and integrate the foundational sacred story at the root and heart of Christmas. Plus you can even spice it up and add the Grinch or Santa coming to visit Baby Jesus and what that means for us today. You can also make the Magi travel around until they get to the Creche on Epiphany.



All of these simple things provide for fun, easy, and authentic conversation starters for us as a family whether we're around the dinner table or just hanging out. It helps us as a family expand our audible prayers, and invisble faith thoughts from gratitude about Barbie, to thanksgiving for healing children, and maybe even to intercession for justice in Darfur, the Middle East and even Oakland.