The Giving Season

Last year, Caleb made Christmas cards for his friends at church by cutting pictures of toys out of magazines and gluing them into the cards.  This year, I wasn't thinking about that and ended up throwing out all the toy magazines after we bought the bunk beds.  Caleb remembered making the cards and he wanted to do something for his friends again this year.  When he brought it up, we had just purchased a 24-pack of play dough during a sale the week before, so I told Caleb and Ethan that they could give some of their play dough to their friends, if they wanted to.  They were up for that, so I got some cute little gift bags at Walmart and we got to work.  Ethan's favorite part was picking which colors of play dough to give to each friend.  It was hilarious to hear them discussing each friend and what colors he/she liked the best.  

After we stuffed the bags with play dough and candy canes, we got to work on the cards.  I typed up a very simple little quad-fold Christmas card in Microsoft Word and printed out ten copies.  Caleb wrote each friend's name and his own name for each card, and Ethan traced his own name for each card.  Caleb spent more than an hour carefully writing all the names (as well as his own name, over and over).  Then Caleb and Ethan put some Christmas stickers on each card, which took them another hour (since Mommy was cheap and bought foam stickers).  After each card was doled out to its corresponding bag, we put all the cute little bags in the car to be hand-delivered to each friend.

I'm glad the boys came up with another good idea this year to help us all remember that Christmas is more about the joy of giving than the fun of receiving.