Sunday, December 13, 2009

Christmas Challenge

Growing up, my mom always strove (Strived?? Striven??? oh well) to give us a Christ-centered Christmas. We would do Sub-For-Santa's, caroling at rest homes...anything to get us more service minded and thinking about the real meaning of Christmas. One tradition that lived through every year was our scripture memorization. Mom would collect 25 scriptures throughout the standard works and write them on little 3x5 cards. Then, every day we would memorize a scripture to count down to Christmas Day. She would entice us by giving us exciting rewards like a mint M&M for memorizing the scripture of the day! Believe it or not, that mint M&M was a real motivation! My siblings and I would strive to be the very first to receive our prize of honor. I'm sad to say that usually meant parroting the scripture back and not really memorizing it. I probably memorized the same scriptures year after year and they were only semi-familiar.
When my older brothers and sisters moved out and I become sort of an only child, scripture memorizing lost it's appeal for me at home. So I brought the scripture cards and the bags of candy to school and challenged my friends! After all, it was tradition and I couldn't give it up. In college I posted scriptures on the white board on my dorm room. I don't think anyone but me looked them up, not to mention memorized them, but it was still there.
Then I married, and believe it or not, a mint M&M didn't sound too appealing, and alas! Days started to slip by when I didn't even look at the scripture cards! I started using the same scripture cards year after year, and only the short ones were getting memorized...over and over and over again. So this year, I decided my little family needed to do something else to get Christ more into Christmas...at least until Evelyn can memorize scriptures and get excited over mint M&Ms.
So I thought of a new challenge. I know December is halfway over, but there's still two weeks! Here it is: are you ready?

Write a Carol or a poem to your King!
It has to be original text, but you can set it to existing music, or simply create a poem expressing your feelings about the Savior's Birth or Ministry.
I'd write mine here, but it's not quite finished....
Anyway good luck! And let me know if you're up to the challenge!

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