The Christmas Card

I love Christmas cards.

It is a great delight to design our card each year.  I plan a photo shoot in advance, coordinating outfits and trying to create variety from year to year.

I also love receiving Christmas cards.  This year brought a bushel. Families from down the street or from cities decades in my past. Young and old. Big and small.

I know we used to send those Christmas cards and letters with nary a photo to be had, but I love the pictures. I think three of my 100+ cards this year came without a photo. New babies, graduations, weddings, and even the families missing a member this year, this is how see the milestones from the families from across my lifetime.

We hang them around the family room door frame, inside and out, until we run out of room, and then we put them in a sleigh on the kitchen counter.

Then, it comes time to clean up the Christmas décor. I never know what to do with all these beautiful cards. But, aside from immediate family, they typically go in the trash can. And no more smiling faces until after Thanksgiving the next year.

I wondered how to do it differently this year. How could we remember these families all year round?

This is what I landed on: Keep the cards and pray for the families.

One small way to remember those in our life and also to teach the kids how to truly pray for others.

So, beginning tomorrow, we’ll begin this experiment. I will be the first to admit my New Year’s ideas sometimes lose steam as we move into the year. Like eating. Or doing family projects. Etc.

However, my work out project that started in January of 2018 is still going strong thanks to my neighbor and dear friend who I work out with.

More on my spending project tomorrow that my best friend and I are tackling.

Here’s how I’m going to try and make this work.

We collected all our Christmas cards and put them in a big bag. That bag will hang from our art/game shelf next to the kitchen table. Every Sunday night (except this week as it starts on a Tuesday), we will select three families. With well over 100 cards, it’s the only way we’ll get through everyone this year.

Three seemed to be a good number because each triplet will have primary responsibility for one of the families.

Every night, we’ll pray for each family member by name in our bedtime prayers. And that week, each triplet will select one family and write them a note to let them know they are in our prayers for the week. Something short, so that it’s sustainable: We wanted to drop you a note this week to let you know that your family is in our prayers all week long. We’ve been looking at your Christmas card and praying for each of you. We hope you have a wonderful week!

Whatever the kids decide to say is what it will ultimately look like, but one of them still needs a little help with spelling so we’ll use some type of format.

Of course, as family members and friends have needs, they always go into our prayers. But this will help us focus on those who we might not remember to pray for during the year. Plus, if my life is any indication, those prayers can often come at an indispensable time because God is just like that.

If you ended up with an extra Christmas card, and didn’t happen to send us one this year, you can still drop it in the mail and we’ll add your family to our bag.

I have high hopes for my various goals for 2019, but this one is at the top.

Praying your 2019 is more than you could have asked or imagined.