http://desidirectory.com/indian-festival-events/

Our solution was to focus on the theme that Christ not only came to dwell among us and save us from our sins, but did so for the *whole world*, not just “us” or “Americans.” Yeah, it’s a “duh” statement, but how often do we explicitly teach that (those of us who don’t work among internationals)?

Minus Christmas Day, New Years’ Eve and New Years’ Day (you don’t have to subtract those but we do for family events), that leaves 9 days and on each of those days we celebrate Christmas “in” a different world region. We just started doing this so some of these are ideas that we haven’t implemented yet, but they are all our end goal: Each day we learn a little about the region, a lot about how the various countries in that region celebrate Christmas, listen to music from that region (preferably Christmas music, but that’s hard to come by for some countries), eat food from that region, and pray for the needs of those people, remembering both our brothers and sisters in Christ who live there as well as the people who are still lost. We especially remember to pray for situations of poverty, war, and persecution. Doing this also helps carry the theme of helping international charities. (Something else we do just because I’m into genealogy, but it’s not necessary, is to set aside a day or two to focus on countries your ancestors came from. It never hurts to teach kids a little personal history.) We’ve also started collecting nativites from each of those regions to help us “experience” a little bit of each culture and appreciate their ways of depicting the Christ-Child. A local shop here called “Global Gallery” has nativities around this time of year. There’s also a wonderful website at http://www.christmas-treasures.com/ and on the home page they have a link to Nativities. All are fair trade products.

Then it all ends on Three Kings’ Day/Epiphany on January 6th with celebrating the coming of wise men, the anunciation of Jesus as King and what that means, putting the decorations away, and talking over dinner about what we liked about this year’s celebrations, what we didn’t, and whether there’s anything we’d want to do differently next year. And if you want to do a Three Kings’ Cake, all the better!

One last thought. Aside from a few small stocking stuffers, we also do the three gifts thing to remember the Wise Men. My dilemma was what about the tons of stuff the Grandparents were going to get? Ours daughters are the only two grandchildren on both sides of the family, so there’s no way to avoid it. We decided, instead of creating tension between family members, to present it as an example of God’s generosity. God lavished His love on us by sending His only Son for our sins. Grandparents are wonderful examples of that kind of lavishing love.

Two things: 1) the book is a memoir and that means it is told from Frank’s memory and perception – honest? well? 2) how actual this story is has to be related to the previous. Hyperbole, conflation, extrapolation, rhetoric are part of the genre. Seeing things a certain way through Frank’s eyes, may not be, in any definitive sense, the way they really were.

Regardless of whether he is well-fed off his flock or not, he’s setting a very bad example by demonstrating a total lack of perspective.

Much of the world lives on a couple dollars per day. Spending what could be thousands of dollars (don’t know if the pastor has 1 kid or several) on presents that are likely made by some of those extremely poor people= amazingly bad example of leadership.

Ah well. That just kinda made me twitchy at the excess being displayed by a pastor.

PS: super blog. i am truly grateful to have found it via link-following from various other places.

hehe…I am Sooo there with you. We have taken pretty much the same approach and went tthrough that a couple of years ago when our oldest was in Kindergarten. He’s very black and white and had a hard time understanding how he could allow his friends to believe something that “just wasn’t” true!”

Holy bleepity-bleepity-bleep!!! I have long since realized that independently wealthy people have totally different concepts of money than I have, and $1000 to them can be equivalent to $50 to me. But still! It’s time for me to start getting my Christmas Grump on and start complaining about how commercialized Christmas has become.

What? You say that isn’t what Christmas is about either? Oh, it’s about celebrating the coming of Christ. That’s right. I keep forgetting.

I love the ideas you give here. We do a couple of them already, but I think I’m going to add in a couple of the others.

I’ll also put in a plug for Gospel For Asia, GFA – they have a fantastic list of Christmas gifts that we here in America can give to the less wealthy in India and Asia. Please do check them out.