Sharing the Joy of Christmas

For those of you who have been with me for a while you'll remember that I moved in April. I stayed with my same roommates but we moved to a bigger house. Our new house is on a quiet little street with several neighbors. Due to our crazy schedules we haven't had much time to get to know them. A couple of months ago one of my roommates, Lauren, and I decided that it would be fun to bake Christmas cookies and share them with the neighbors this year.

Over the last couple of weeks we mixed and baked 10 dozen sugar cookies the stuck them in the freezer. This weekend we pulled them all out to decorate. Well it turns out that all of my creativity goes into writing my books (and learning how to knit on a loom- that's a recent accomplishment we can talk about later) and not into anything else. So well I started decorating the cookies I really struggled with it but Lauren, who is super artsy, was able to finish them and did an amazing job!

We also decided that we would get Christmas cards to go with them. Without knowing our neighbors there's no good way to share about Christ. We don't want to be pushy but we did want to find a way to be able to share why we celebrate Christmas. We found these cards that say Peace on Earth and have a few words inside about celebrating the birth of Christ. We wrote Merry Christmas on them, signed our names and wrapped up the cookies.

We started this plan just wanting to spread a little joy but the reactions we got blessed us more then we could've imagined. One neighbor is a single dad who only has his son part time. He almost started to cry when we gave him his cookies and card. He told us that this is the first Christmas thing he's received this year.

Another neighbor is a small family, we've never had much of a chance to talk to them but the mom seemed really grateful and the kids were excited for the sugar! There's a neighbor who's an older woman that lives alone. She invited us into her home and we learned that she keeps an eye out for us on our house because she knows we all work different schedules and she just wants to make sure everything's okay with us.

One other neighbor wasn't home when we delivered their cookies but she wrote us a thank you card and stuck in our mail box. In addition to our neighbors we took cookies to our favorite coffee shop. The baristas were so excited and touched that we had thought of them. And we took cookies to a little food cart we like. The owner was so thrilled she took a picture and posted it on their Facebook page thanking us!

We never told anyone we were Christians. We didn't have long conversations. All we did was take some of our time and wrote out some cards to try and bless others. In the end we were incredibly blessed.

So there's our story of sharing the joy this Christmas.