Christmas

Call it a modern-day miracle. Thirteen years after signing the development deal, production of my best-selling novel Christmas Jars is finally coming to theaters on November 4th and coming to BYUtv throughout the holiday season.

This year The Tabernacle Choir, Orchestra at Temple Square, and Bells on Temple Square will perform their annual acclaimed Christmas concert in the Conference Center on Temple Square in Salt Lake City, Utah, on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, December 12–14, 2019, at 8:00 p.m. The featured guest(s) for the 2019 concerts will be announced in October.

We recently sat down as a family to talk about how we want to honor the Lord’s day. We began the conversation by talking about Christmas. It is one of our favorite holidays. We begin preparing for it months in advance. We talked about the food that we love to eat, the traditions we participate in, and the reasons why we look forward to the gathering. We made a list of our traditions: new pajamas, ebelskivers for breakfast, fun games, and quiet moments gathered around burning candles when we remember the times we have seen the hand of the Lord in our lives. Those are just a few. It became clear that the reason we love Christmas isn’t because it is December 25; it is because we have set apart that day as a celebration focused on Christ with good food, fun, and time spent talking about what is important. Then I asked if we might be able to set apart the Sabbath as a holy celebration similar to Christmas. If the day were filled with family, good food, and fun and conversations centered on Christ, would it become a day we looked forward to, similar to the way we look forward to December 25? We decided to give it a try. We started establishing traditions that would intentionally set that day apart from every other day of the week. I call these our sweet Sabbath moments. In our home it is a family-only day. We spend time together playing games or making cookies. Grace loves to make and decorate sugar cookies; I like to make meringues. We trade off. For one hour each Sunday we gather in the family room with a journal and spend time talking about what matters most. This is a time for reading the scriptures, studying doctrines and principles, goal setting and family planning—a weekly time to center our life again, with God’s purposes in mind. The evenings are for large family gathering. Married kids, aunts and uncles, cousins, and grandma and grandpa usually gather to eat dinner and share stories and laugh. With deliberate planning, Sundays have become my most favorite day of the week.

This week's FHE lesson topic comes from the Come, Follow Me reading in John 7-10. Check out this week's Come, Follow Me study ideas on LDS Living for additional resources and suggestions.

As we prepare for Easter this month, let us remember amidst the family parties, egg hunts, and bunny trails that we celebrate this special day because of Him—our Savior Jesus Christ. As the video description for a new video posted by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints states, "The love and sacrifice of Jesus Christ is the antidote for every negative aspect of our lives. Because of Him, we can overcome sadness, despair, anxiety, hatred—and someday, even death."

As we study Luke and Matthew 2 this week in the Come, Follow Me curriculum, here is a video by Daniel Smith from Messages of Christ that might provide insight into the wise men who visited Jesus and the symbolism of their gifts.