gifts of love

I love, truly love, going through the gift catalogs and choosing what to give.

Honestly,

if we did nothing else to celebrate Christmas,

I would be great with that.

It isn't that I don't love my children

and love giving them gifts that will bring them pleasure,

but lets face it,

they have no true needs, and quite honestly, since we don't watch TV, there are very few wants even.

Add to that, we have a tiny house.

But even when we build a bigger house - I don't want it filled with junk,

I just want the junk that we already have

 to have a place ;-)

Books are gifts that keep giving,

but books don't exactly elicit squeals of delight on Christmas morning....

And there's also the matter of kids giving to each other and learning to be generous

(which, really, all of our kids already are....)

Just the other day, Jeremiah was saying he didn't know which he liked better about Christmas,

the excitement of his gifts,or the excitement of giving gifts.

I don't want to take that away....

Anyways - that was a roundabout way of saying that every year, we tweak,

and try to figure out the best way, for our family, to celebrate the birth and love of Christ.

I don't think we've arrived yet at the ideal solution, but I trust one day we will.

Rebekah had asked me to share the organizations that we buy from.

Now, I haven't thoroughly researched these, 

We just started with Ann's recommendations and went from there.

Compassion International is probably my favorite;

we sponsor kids through Compassion and have been 'exposed' to the organization in various ways

and have followed blogger trips and such,

but if we found chickens cheaper elsewhere (and we did) we purchased elsewhere.

Yes, we comparison shop.

It's how we always shop.

We want our money to go as far as it possibly can.

The first year, we didn't have paper catalogs and did all shopping online.

Last year it was a mixture of both.

This year, we got catalogs from all the organizations we've purchased from in the past, 

so we will most likely do our selecting that way, but order online.

The kids have already been looking through the catalogs, which I love!

I imagine there is plenty of time to order catalogs for your family if you request them soon.

This post tells what we bought from where last year, and includes links to the organizations

and this one is from two years ago, when we started the tradition.

I don't know what all our Christmas celebration will look like this year,

but one thing is for sure,

it will include gifts for Jesus.