Last year the boys and I did little acts of kindness during Christmastime to remind them to focus on others. Not too many, just a few. And we loved it! With all the countdowns and Santa hullabaloo, I love how service efforts get their attention on something less selfish. Last year, I got all choked up as we walked away from taping quarters on gumball machines! Plus, it's truly fun too :)
So this year, we are again on a mission to think of others more! Based on the idea I found within a program called Light 'Em Up, we are trying to give away as many candy canes as we can. We're also doing the quarters on machines again, along with a few other random, simple things my boys can actually enjoy.
This site offers lots of ideas for doing acts of Christmas kindness. Most of them involve money or gift cards, and are out of my boys' age range yet. But there were a few I knew they would enjoy and that I could modify a bit to get them involved.
Wouldn't it make you smile to get one of these?! :)
Light 'Em Up has lots of great resources to print, including some coloring sheets for little ones. I just took the coloring graphic and turned it into a tag for our candy canes and quarters, so they could really be from them and not just be something I put together myself :) I also wanted something with a nativity theme on it, so there are some of those too.
Cute, eh? :)
They colored these little cards and then helped tape quarters to them.
Now all we have to do once we get to the machines is tape the cards on.
They seemed pretty excited about it :) My boys are old enough to understand the good feeling of being kind and serving, but not old enough to do lots of more grand types of service. They also can't read a whole paragraph on a note yet, so these super simple ones that they could color worked great to help them feel like this is their thing and not just mine trying to convince them it's cool :)
And the bag of them is all ready to go in my purse! We've already been in town several times and wished we had remembered our candy canes or quarter sheets so we could give them out. I put the candy canes with notes on them all in a leftover can so we can keep it in the car too...
Check out the printables at Light 'Em Up, and grab these ones below if you'd like to do some fun Christmas Kindness also! These are PDF files- some to color and some with just a simple "We hope this brings you a smile" message:
Enjoy!
