Light the World

Last year we had a really great time participating in the Light the World initiative put on by our church. It really helped us to feel the spirit of giving and Christmas, so we were excited when they planned to do the same thing again. And we made plans. A few of our more memorable attempts to Light the World with service this month include:

"Love thy neighbor as thyself"

 We decorated some of our neighbors' driveways with chalk, wishing them a Merry Christmas. We heard back from several of them saying thank you. Even though we tried to do it anonymously. The ones that weren't our immediate neighbors had some of their neighbors notice us and tell them who it was. For our immediate neighbors, it was easy to guess, since our kids couldn't resist decorating our own driveway, too. :)

 We decided to put our Spanish club to good use doing some service and found an opportunity on JustServe.org to make snack bags for the Ronald McDonald house. Every family brought some snacks (some brought a LOT) and we worked to fill the bags.

 Our goal was 20 bags, but we filled 50.

When we went to deliver the bags the kids were all afraid of the creepy Ronald McDonald sitting there. I had to knock on his head to prove he was just a statue.

 I got to go with the youth in our ward to the cannery to do some humanitarian service, bagging beans of the food bank. We set a record, bagging over 13,000 meals that night.

 The next week we again decided to Light the World with our Spanish club by doing some caroling in español. We had learned Joy to the World in Spanish, and the kids already knew Feliz Navidad well enough, so we went to a few of my neighbors and a few of Karolee's neighbors that we knew speak Spanish to sing to them.

 One of my older neighbors was so sweet, he invited us in to show us his nativity and have us sing to him and his wife. It was great.

This year the kids did the sock drive in their classes at school again. They collected double what they did last year for a total of 738 socks (369 pair).

The loved delivering them to AVIVA (for foster kids) and were really proud to say that they and their classes did that.

Those were the most notable things we did as a family to Light the World, but one of my favorite days was when the theme was "it is lawful to do well on the Sabbath." We had little stars printed out for the kids to leave when they did an act of service, no matter how small. Rachel got into that one and did lots of little acts of service around the house for me and her siblings. It was great finding the stars all around.