O Holy Night

This has been a wonderful Christmas season. I love how as the children get older, they can more fully understand the wonders of Christ's birth. Over the past few years our family has really focused on switching the focus of Christmas from Santa and the commercialism of Christmas, to the remembrance of the Savior. We still talk about Santa and put out cookies for him, but we really try to focus on the Savior. So I was really excited when I found an article at Meridian Magazine that talked about having a Shepherd's Supper.
I started out making these meat pies for dinner. The recipe was more elaborate than I was willing to make, so I just took some canned biscuits and covered them with hamburger and cheese.

Then we filled our knapsacks with our meat pies, grapes, cheese, and an orange.

Each person tied their knapsack around their waist with a cup for juice and dressed in pj's and towels to represent shepherds.

Here are my darling shepherds ready to begin the journey.

We then turned off all the lights in the house except the Christmas tree. We started out by the bedrooms. Jesse had made a great candle at scouts this week and so we used that as our guide to help us make it to Bethlehem.

On our journey, we stopped to eat our dinner (the lights were still out, I just used the flash so you could see the picture). We ate our dinner as the children told us the Christmas story and we talked about the sacred shepherds that guarded the temples sheep.

After we finished eating. We talked about our gifts we could give the Savior. Each person wrote down a service they would offer the other members of the family as their gift to Christ this Christmas. Each of the service gifts were them placed in a basket to give to Jesus.

Then we continued on our journey to Bethlehem. Faith carried the basket and when we reached the Christmas tree, she placed the basket next to the baby Jesus under the tree. We then read the Christmas story in Luke and watched the Nativity movie. After that, we sang our favorite Christmas carols and then drove around town looking at the Christmas lights. It was so neat because Jesse and Faith were so attentive during the Shepherds Supper, they were totally focused on events and didn't start struggling until we were looking at lights. We then came home and set out Santa's cookies and the kids headed to bed. It was a great night!