Holidays
Gathering Around for the Holidays
Holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter are excellent times to teach your children about God.
Thanksgiving.
Regardless of what age your children are teaching and sharing thanksgiving with them can have a deep impression. In looking up the word translated thanksgiving in the Old Testament (yada) I found that it is associated with the concepts of confession and praise. The way that confession relates to thanksgiving is that it has to do with remembering. We call to mind God’s attributes and deeds. The acknowledging of these things and how we are benefited from them (praise) is thanksgiving.
You can use thanksgiving as a time to count your blessings. Think of the good that has happened over the past year. Consider the good in your present circumstances. It doesn’t matter how great or small the things seems. Like the old song says, “Count your many blessings name them one by one, and it will surprise you what the Lord has done.”
You can also teach your children the importance of living intentionally for God. If you review the lives of older Godly people (Biblical characters, relatives, people from church) you can help your children see that they can be a source of thanksgiving (see Matthew 5:16), and have thankgiving as they reflect on the outcome of their lives.
Do this in a way that your children are thankful for the time.
Christmas and Easter
These holidays are most clearly related to the story of Jesus. This is an excellent opportunity to read the parts of the bible that deal with his birth (Christmas), and death and resurection (Easter). See the chart below.
Bible Readings for the Holidays
Depending upon the child’s age you need to adjust the length of the reading.
You can make traditions that make the reading time special. When my children were young they used to get their baby dolls and hold them during the reading of the Christmas story. We also lit candles and let our children blow them out. Even though they are older they still like to do this.
You can create your own traditions, raising up early on Easter, reading portions of the story through out the day like it is a news report, reading around the dinner table, reading at a certain time of the day, having them read or play roles in the story, hold up certain pictures at different parts of the story, or whatever you can think of. It can be simple or elaborate. The important thing is to repeat it year after year.
As your children get older you may want to discuss the events and make sure that they understand at an older level as they growup. These are not fairy tales and your children may have questions about virgin birth, angels, prophecies, resurrection, and other supernatural aspects of the historical events. Reading such books as Lee Strobel’s,
- The Case for Christ
or Josh McDowell’s
- The New Evidence that Demands a Verdict
, may help you in this task.