Family Activity for the New Year

Vintage Homeschool Moms

Family Activity For The New Year ~ Episode 545

What family activity can you do as you close the year or ring in the new year? In this episode, Felice shares how she began the idea of family activities that have a lasting impact and unite the family.

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How can you share an activity with your family that will have an impact for years to come? No matter how old (or young) your children are, they can benefit from this idea. When my children were little, most family activities were related to what we did. We cooked, baked, and shared movie night together. There was a routine for these things. If it was movie night or pizza night, we ordered or made pizza, and we picked out a movie to watch as a family and dressed in pjs beforehand. We ate popcorn or some other snack and enjoyed this time together. The person who completed their entire school checklist, including all chores without reminders, could select the movie for the family. There were variations of this for movie selection, which could get contentious between siblings!

Family Activity:

The family activity had these three elements:

1. Food – breaking of bread
2. Uniting
3. Enjoyable

The breaking of bread or eating together has a Biblical symbolism. In fact, many cultures enjoy the family meal, and that is actually a topic of an upcoming podcast in the new year. The family meal is a time to sit together, discuss the happenings of the day, and enjoy each other’s company. Our family rule was to ask permission to leave the table and stay until everyone finished. You may add things like no cell phones or come to the table with one thing you’d like to discuss or talk about — to give the kids time to think and prepare.

The developed or planned family activity grew from my children becoming teens and young adults. It was as if I went into hyperdrive to ensure that all that I wanted to teach them about important things were covered before they left. The activity parameters this time were different. It was more about uniting the family, having a faith focus, and ongoing.

Let me explain my reasoning so that you can use this as a starting point for your family and add to it as ideas come to you.

Family Activity – Gift That Keeps On Giving:

1. Uniting: This brings the family together in some way that helps us realize we are a family that God put together for a reason.
2. Faith Focus: Teaching a deeper truth. God loves us, yes–but there is more. Do we practice the Gifts of the Holy Spirit? 1 Corinthians 12
3. Ongoing: Something that we think and pray about year-round.

When do we do this? We typically hold our activities on the second-to-last day that everyone is with us for the Christmas holiday, but the ideas have been brewing for a while.

The ideas came in prayer, but then I tweaked them to make them work the best for our family. One idea stemmed from a favorite Christmas movie, “The Christmas Card.” The story was about a faithful young woman who wrote Christmas cards each year to the soldiers overseas. One of her cards went to a hardened sergeant who, when ordered, took leave and traveled to the town to see for himself if the town was as beautiful as the card made it seem.

The family activity was to write a Christmas Card to each other (randomly drawn names) and include a note encouraging them all year long. This turned out to be wonderful, and I treasure the card I received from one of my sons, which sits in my Bible. I take it out from time to time to read. As a family, we do not write to each other, especially when we all live under the same roof and even when the kids leave. It is so much easier to send a text or call. This was one of my favorite activities.

Another one was repurposing some cardstock door hangers. I printed them out with one side showing a beautiful mountain scene and a Scripture verse, and on the back, it was blank. I passed out stickers, each labeled with a fruit of the spirit. You can look up the fruit of the Spirit in the book of Galatians 5:22-23. In a nutshell, they are:

1. love
2. joy
3. peace
4. patience
5. kindness
6. goodness
7. faithfulness
8. gentleness
9. self-control

I asked each person to star the one they wished they had in abundance and put their name on the back of the door hanger. Then I collected them and passed them out randomly to each person. If someone gets their own, they hand it back or trade it with someone else. The “activity” is a year-long prayer for the person who received to receive this gift. I would remind the kids to pray for their “person,” and often, I was told, “Mom, I do each night!”

These activities are wonderful examples of how we can take a craft or event even and turn it into a memorable lesson for us all. Parents are included – I’m not sure I mentioned that earlier. Let me be honest here: my adult kids groaned every time I presented this type of thing and then fought with each other (good-naturedly), wanting to do the best job (at the craft part – at least). Did I say I have a very competitive family of athletes?

Be sure to let your spouse know about this activity in advance so they can pray in advance and give you ideas or suggestions.

This past Christmas, the idea centered around the Power of Three. This is Biblical because numbers are often repeated in the scriptures to teach a more profound truth. We think of the three of the Trinity – one God and three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We think of three in the Holy Family: Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and so on. I explained this to my family, and then I explained that we would do a tangible activity and something they could keep in their Bibles for the year and consider the idea of the power of the Gospel and its impact on our lives.

I passed out a sheet of paper and had my family fold them into threes, horizontal and vertical, with the final square being small. Then, I asked them to open the paper and write the “threes” in Scripture that stood out to them. I also site the Scripture verse, Matthew 18:20: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

They dove into this activity, even “cheating” by pulling up the concept on their cell phones and citing the number of times three is used in scripture (467). After completing this, we discussed the importance of family and praying together. I then paired the family into two as prayer partners. Two or more symbolized the two, and the third was bringing God into their prayers.

This tiny idea was brewing for some time. At one point, I considered some memento, perhaps on a keychain, that reminds them to pray for each of us in the family. Instead, the folded paper idea won out. If you have ideas, contact me or post them on the website—VHM Episode 545. I’d love to see how you celebrate the new year with your family.

I pray this gives you some ideas for an activity you can do with the family after the Christmas holiday or whenever you gather together. I pray you had a blessed Christmas and a wonderful New Year. Thanks for listening in, and stay tuned for incredible new and exciting shows from Vintage Homeschool Moms and all of us at the Ultimate Homeschool Podcast Network.

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