Christmas Tradtions

This year David and I are blessed enough to celebrate our second Christmas as a married couple! Part of being a young family is combining family traditions and creating your own. Since we don't have children yet most of our traditions are tailored ones from our families. One that we have started together has to do with gift-giving.

In our society it is very easy to get caught up in the hullaballoo of gifts. Instead of focusing on receiving the greatest gift of all, a Savior, we instead focus on all the gifts of this world. I am a huge culprit of this. Many of us are. The problem isn't our want of worldly things. The problem comes when we place these worldly things in front of Him. As a way of celebrating the season of gift giving, and the birth of a Savior, David and I started the tradition of three gifts.

Instead of allowing ourselves to become overwhelmed and overrun by the crazy at Christmastime, and in turn losing sight of the true purpose, we give each other three gifts. One gift is something we want, one is something we need, and the final gift is something Biblical. These loosely match the three gifts the wise men brought to the baby Jesus upon His birth. We already have so much more than we could ever want, so why do we need to give gifts just to give gifts?

This is a tradition we plan to bring to our family when we have children. Will it be easy to explain to our children why they don't have as many gifts as their friends? No. Will it be worth it? Without a doubt. We are not depriving ourselves of anything, we are just not allowing ourselves to get caught up in superfluous things.

This is the first of many traditions David and I are creating together. What traditions have you started??