December Days of Christmas Kindness

To follow up from my post earlier this week... a couple of friends posted some great links to articles about Santa and Jesus.  Instead of regurgitating a lot of similarities, I'll just post the links.  We will be doing something similar. I just need some good children's books on St. Nicholas.  If they don't exist, I'll need an illustrator to partner with me so I can write one of my own.  Hmm... :)

What We Tell Our Kids About Santa (this is most similar to how we plan to teach Santa)

Smackdown: Santa vs Jesus

Moving on to our December project for 2011.
December Days of Christmas Kindness
The Plan: One random act of kindness every day for the month of December.
-Oliver is too small to really do a lot of actions with love other than grab your face and try to eat it kiss style yet we still wanted to do something for others to share in the spirit of giving this season.  We came up with the idea to do one act of kindness every day and made a list of things to do if we didn't see an opportunity.

The Budget: $86.34
-We didn't think of this until just a couple weeks ago and we'd already spent or budgeted our Christmas allowance so we decided to use two pots of money.  The first was incredibly fitting - the second was our jar of spare change we had just sitting around.  Ok so the first pot  of money is from Oliver's Blessing Bank.  (If you haven't read about Blessing Banks on my blog, I'd encourage you to read the posts I linked just now, it's a really neat story!)  I've been putting change and paper money in Oliver's bank (we use that instead of a traditional 'piggy bank') since I was pregnant so it was full.  Next year we will plan this better and will hopefully have learned from this year how much we want to allocate for this project.


The deets: Both Chandler and I will be carrying out the project, but since he works full time, I'll be doing most of the days.  We'll report back each day with what we did and how much we may have spent.  I am so, so excited to do this!!!  We have a list of about forty-five random acts of kindness that we pulled from around the internet and came up with one night while up talking in bed.  I'm hoping that there will be some things that arise naturally and we won't have to pull too much from the list.  To keep us on track and accountable, I'll be keeping a log of what we did (as a plus, I'll be adding that to a page in Project Life).  I would love to be able to post what we did each day, but my track record stinks lately so I'll plan to post weekly at a minimum and more often if I have time and think about it.

I would LOVE if you would participate too!  If a month is a little much for you, try a week - or perhaps do the Twelve Days of Christmas, Kindness style! :)  If you do, let me know - I'd love to hear how it went for you.  If you have a favorite act of kindness we'd love to hear it!