Why Celebrate Christmas at Thanksgiving?

No, I’m talking about changing the day we celebrate Christ’s birth.  I’m talking about exchanging gifts at Thanksgiving instead of Christmas to help simplify and re-focus the Christmas season on Christ. At Thanksgiving, we’re thankful for each other.  My family simply shows an extension of that thankfulness in the form of gift giving.

Why we give gifts at Thanksgiving instead of at Christmas (& why we’ll keep on doing it):

• it cuts down on shopping during an already hectic season month
• makes consumerism and commercialization take a back seat to the celebration of Christ’s birth
• helps my kids family to focus on what we can do for others instead of what we want or hope for ourselves
• flows easily out of being thankful for one another {especially for those with “Gift Giving” as their primary love language}
• children and college students are out of school so there’s no need for calendar massage to make the special day work {parents are generally off work then, too}
• decorations go up the week before Thanksgiving Day {my daughter insisted on having presents under a tree for nostalgia so her friends wouldn’t think her parents were extra special weird} so that’s one less thing to do during the Christmas season month
• we get to focus 100% on other people in the weeks leading up to Christmas – think service, service, service
• we get to enjoy all the Christmas parties we’re invited to because so much of the chaos-inducing activities are finished (i.e. gift buying, wrapping, home decorating, etc.)
• grown and married children don’t have to travel to multiple households on Christmas morning – our family’s big extravaganza has already happened so they won’t miss a thing!  {Did I mention their in-laws love us?}

There are many, many more reasons why we’ll keep celebrating like this, but I hope the ideas above have intrigued you to learn more about this alternative way to celebrate the Christmas Holiday. I’ll be talking more about it in the next week or so over at Keeper of the Home.  Don’t worry, I’ll let you know when!

What do you do differently at Christmas to make the holidays focus more clearly on the birth of Christ?