This year, my family made a few modifications to the Christmas Eve tradition I blogged about yesterday. First off, because of unusual scheduling, we ended up having our Christmas Eve dinner this evening instead of yesterday evening. However, the major difference is that, this time, we had more of a production than we usually do. We usually just share testimonies and other sacred thoughts. This time, we also had a structured program in which we read Christmas scriptures and sang Christmas hymns.
We still had all the traditional things. We still ate bread, fruit, and cheese by candlelight. It was still a quiet, sacred evening. Adding the hymns-and-scriptures program gave the evening a bit more focus. However, it also made the evening less quiet, so I feel that there was a slight trade-off, but I think that the retelling of the Christmas story was nice. Some families read Luke 2 every Christmas. Ours hasn't. Maybe we should.
Then again, just because some families do something, that doesn't mean that others should. Different traditions work out well for different families. Each family is unique, so it makes sense that they'd do things differently. We may borrow ideas from each other, and those ideas we borrow may turn into lasting traditions, or they may not. Each family needs to find the traditions that work best for them, and sharing family traditions and trying out new things are how we can each discover the traditions that work best for us.
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