Family Christmas traditions

One of my favorite things about the Christmas season is special memories built through a variety of traditional activities we do as a family each year. Some of these started 30+ years ago when I was a child and some are things Adena and I started with our girls. Here are a few of ours:

  1. imageChristmas ornaments – Our Christmas tree is decorated from top to bottom with ornaments, including some which date from the year I was born. We add to this collection each year with tokens from special activities done during the year (2016 added several from our cross country road trip). The ornament pictured here was made when I was a child by one of my aunts. The girls call him the “kissy ornament” because his mouth holds a Hershey’s kiss. They wake up each morning and check to see if he has new chocolate for their enjoyment. We unpack our boxes of ornaments every year and reminisce.

  2. imageSpecial events at church – Our church hosts an annual talent night as well as a Christmas Eve service. These are special times together with our extended church family and the new memories are made each year. One of my good friends/co-workers donned Santa garb this year to read Dr. Seuss’s timeless classic “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”. This year, Sarah Beth also performed, playing Up on the Housetop, which her piano teacher helped her select and prepare.

  3. imageFamily built gingerbread house – I stress family built on this one because it might be a lot easier if I hid in the other room while Adena and the girls did this. Somehow my “perfectionist” tendencies make it challenging to participate when the girls don’t share my need for symmetry or straight lines. But I have to drop all of that when the box opens up because a grumpy dad who only wants to do it his way might as well skip the project altogether. And what would be the fun in that? This year, one of my girls wanted to draw architectural plans for the house before we started. I may be rubbing off on them more than I realize.

  4. Screen Shot 2015-12-20 at 10.21.17 PMThe Syfrett Express – This year marks the third year of one of our most recent family Christmas traditions. Adena and I pick a night where we surprise the girls with two “tickets” to get on board the Syfrett Express for a trip around town to look at Christmas lights. We play the Polar Express audio in the van while we drive around, plus we enjoy hot chocolate and a snack. Decorating houses seems to be growing less popular than it was when I was a kid, but we can always find a few homes where the owners are going for a Clark Griswold style award to see how many lights they can use in their front yard.

  5. Christmas morning – Each year, we get the girls up and take time, before we openfisher-price-nativity-set-2327358-01 presents and unpack stockings, to read the Luke 2 narrative of Christ’s birth and remember the real reason for the season. Every year that goes by, December seems busier, the world seems more commercialized, and it seems harder to prioritize the thing that we know is most important at Christmas – worshipping Jesus. Setting aside this time, as well as others through Advent readings and a special calendar, is key to portraying a Christmas that is more about Him than about tinsel and tags, promotions and packages.

What are your family’s Christmas traditions? How do you help your children keep Jesus central to Christmas?

Related posts:

  1. The Neighborhood Christmas Parade is another of our highlights. (2016 Update: they hosted a Holiday Festival this year where Sarah Beth sold handmade bags.)
  2. Celebrating Immanuel: God with us
  3. Praying for Three Wise Gifts

Counting down to December 31

time wisely quote

We have just one month left!. And December often feels like the busiest month of the year. But there is still time to measure some progress on the goals you set for the year.

Hopefully you wrote some things down in January or at some point earlier this year. You said – “this is what I want this year to be about.”

You could look now and say – “well, I missed it” OR “sure, I got some of that done, but not nearly enough.”

But if you give up, you are missing the fact that there are still more than 30 days left. Maybe twenty or less if you factor in all the parties and holiday activities. That is still something!

Tips for last-minute progress

So here are my tips for a last-minute, last-ditch effort to make progress toward your annual goals:

  1. Look at them! If you don’t look back at them until you’re debriefing in January, you can’t gain any more ground.
  2. Which goal did you set that no longer seems important?  Did your priorities change mid-year?  Did other circumstances dictate that you should write one off? Cross that one off your list and focus on what’s really key to you.
  3. Is there anything that is almost finished, but just needs a little more push? Can you schedule time to finish that out?calendar
  4. Which one isn’t nearly done, but you could accomplish more than you have so far? What two actions would improve you from an F to a C? It may not be an A, but a C is certainly better.
  5. Which one is honestly a loss? There are plenty of goals that you can’t knock out in give or take 20 days. But take a few minutes to think about this. Why did you not make any progress? Is there anything standing in the way of progress in this area? Maybe you can do something to address the obstacles, even if you can’t push toward the goal.
  6. Write down a few things related to your goals that you can do to make progress. Block out time in your calendar to get them done. December 31 will feel better because you did!

Here are a few things on my list:

  1. I haven’t hired a Marketing Director yet, but I have some really good prospects. How can I use the 5 remaining weeks to lock a plan in for starting the new year strong?
  2. One of my goals for the year was a complete overhaul of our Employee Handbook. I already collected a list of things that need to be addressed. I can’t get a final version perfect, but blocking out one day would make it a lot better than it is right now. What about five hours next week, plus an hour a week or a section a week until it’s completely done? I can’t finish by January 1, but I’m pretty sure February 1 would do it.
  3. I have a few areas that I was hoping to make some progress on, but realized during the year that I don’t have the talent to cover this personally. How about if I try to allocate budget resources to hire for this one in the first quarter? I can’t do the job in the next five weeks, but if I wait until the new year to think about it, the budget won’t be there.

What can you do?

The point here is to identify – what can you do? Rome wasn’t built in a day. You eat an elephant one bite at a time. Every journey begins with a single step. I could go on. What can you do today? What can you do with an hour next week? What can you do if you take a minute now and carve out time on your calendar?

Sports Metaphors for the Non-Sports Leader

I have never been a sports guy. During first grade, my parents signed me up for kids soccer. I’m pretty sure this was at the recommendation of our family pediatrician. He probably thought I would benefit from the physical activity. We honestly lost EVERY single game we played. I may have been one of those kids who kicked the ball into the other team’s goal. I’m not proud of that season of play and my parents didn’t make me do it again. Even at 6, I knew it didn’t mean much when we got a trophy at the end of the season.

sports metaphors for leadership

My sports prowess didn’t improve later in life. I took Band to keep from having to take PE in middle school. In high school, PE teams were not looking for me when they had a choice. This translates into my watching habits also. Unless it’s Carolina Basketball, the Super Bowl or the Olympics, my TV rarely lingers on sports.

But regardless of how much of a sports person I am, sports metaphors are EVERYWHERE around me. In life, in work, in ministry. Sometimes a good sports metaphor is the simplest way to achieve shared understanding. So whether you’re into sports or not, you should have a working knowledge of these. If you can use them, it will help you when you speak to an audience that does have sports awareness.

measuring progress toward a goal“move the ball down the field”

In football, the goal is to gain yards every play with the eventual objective being a touchdown by getting to the end zone. As such, moving the ball down the field is making measured progress toward your goal.

To use this metaphor well, though, you need to clearly identify two things:

  • What’s your goal? Is it clearly defined? When I was kicking the ball the wrong direction as a 6 year old clueless soccer player, I wasn’t moving toward the goal. In the same way, many teams spend lots of time and energy moving things around without a clearly defined goal. You can’t claim to be moving DOWN the field, if you don’t know which direction the end zone is!
  • What counts as progress? If you identify your goal but it is not easy to measure, anyone on the team might regard any activity as progress. It’s important for us as leaders to spell out our goals and activities in ways that our teams know clearly when we are, OR are not, moving toward the goal.

“who dropped the ball?”identifying the source of the team breakdown

When a sports team is working together to achieve a goal, dropping the ball ends the forward progress.

In a project team, even if there is not actual competition, there are often times when things stop moving forward. Things aren’t going the way they are supposed to and you are not seeing the results you would like. In such a moment, the team needs to identify where things went wrong and if any particular player was the source of the failure. This should NEVER be unto tearing that person apart.

If you can identify the breakdown, you can work to address it. You can try to bring healing or restoration at the point of failure. Maybe that team member needed better backup or more resources. Whatever the need may have been, you won’t fix it well and start moving forward if you don’t take the time to think it through.

Maybe the breakdown happened in a handoff. The pass moment is one of the most critical moments of any basketball game. The ball is moving from one player’s hands to another, often through open air. If an opponent can get in at just the right moment and gain control of the ball before it gets to the other player, the tide of the game is turned.

In a team setting, make the new ownership clear when a work task is passed from one player to the next. This is where our next metaphor comes in.

“the ball is in your court”team sharing roles on a project

My girls spent a brief time trying out youth tennis. It was rather painful to watch because they didn’t quite have the coordination to keep up with where the ball was moving. They tried hard though and I was proud of the attempt.

Doubles tennis is when two players compete on each side of the net, typically each taking responsibility if the ball comes to their half of the court. The girls’ coach kept telling the kids “you have to call it”. Inevitably, the ball would go to one girl’s side but the other girl was so focused on hitting it, they would run over top of each other. Alternatively, both girls would be watching one side of the court and not go after the ball when it went to the other side.

As a team works together on a project, it is important that everyone clearly understand who is responsible for details every step of the way. Sally thinks Jim is working on things and Jim thinks Fred took over that piece. Fred was out of the office the last couple of days and suddenly we are making no progress.

If everyone thinks someone else is on it, no one is on it. If you’re a team leader or a player, take time to make sure everyone knows who is responsible for different functions each step of the process.

Conclusion

These are just a few of the common ones I have seen in my experience. I use these metaphors all regularly even though I would not be likely to excel at any of these sports in actual practice. What about you? Are there any others you can think of?