Three Wise Men

I love traditions, especially at Christmas time. Nick and I started doing a tradition 2 years ago that I call the "Three Wise Men" tradition. We started out with wanting Christmas to be spread out through the whole day and not just open gifts first thing in the morning and not have anything else to look forward to for the rest of the day. I decided we shoud start a tradition where we set 3 gifts aside to represent the three wise men gifts and not open them until the evening. These gifts would be more spiritual gifts or at least gifts we find at Deseret Book! The first year we did it we got a hymn book, General Conference on CD, and I can't remember what the third gift was, but I'm sure it was a good one! :)

The following year I decided to change our tradition. Instead of buying gifts for ourselves I thought it would be a more meaningful tradition to buy gifts for other people where we saw a need. My next door neighbor at the time was struggling financially so Nick and I took over a couple of gifts for his 2 little girls. Walmart was doing a coat drive so we bought a coat to donate. Last, Nick was talking with one of his co-workers and she told him she's never read the scriptures because she doesn't understand them. So we bought her a children's version of the Book of Mormon that is full of pictures to illistrate the stories.

We haven't quite decided what we're going to do for our three gifts this year. We're taking dinner to a lady that is no longer active in the church who is having a tumor removed this week. I think we'll draw a name from a giving angel tree as well, but I'm not sure what we'll do for our third gift.

We're still working out all the kinks, but hopefully it will be a tradition we do for the rest of our lives. I hope once our lives slow down a little and we're not both working full time and going to school, we'll do more service geared gifts rather than just purchasing things for people in need, but right now that's pretty much all we have time for!