Gratitude & Giving: The Heart of the Holidays
Gratitude is a beautiful gift we can offer our children, and December is the perfect time! Here are some ideas for giving and gratitude for young children during the holiday season.
Gratitude Ritual
Incorporate gratitude into your everyday life by starting a routine of sharing what you are grateful for. These can be simple, ordinary moments such as a walk in the neighborhood, spending time with grandpa, extra yummy strawberries, or a new favorite set of markers. A Gratitude Jar offers a visible representation for young children. For each gratitude, add a small stone or gem to a mason jar and watch it fill! Alternatively, children can draw a small picture or write a word to put in the jar or hang on the Christmas tree.
Acts of Service
Children learn best when they can be active participants! When we include children in age-appropriate service projects, we begin expanding their perspective beyond themselves. For in-person service opportunities, Feed My Starving Children and Senior Centers are often child-friendly. Making cards is a simple “at-home” service project. These handmade cards can be delivered to community helpers (such as the police and fire department or sanitation and postal workers) as a thank you for their service or given to seniors at local senior centers to bring some joy to their day during the holiday season. Various organizations also offer “at-home” service projects, such as Foster Alliance, where children can create birthday cards or decorate birthday bags for a foster child, or Youth For Troops, which offers decorating care package boxes or creating handmade thank you cards for service members.
For younger children, an easy way to make a set of cards is to give them a large piece of paper to paint. You can add texture to the painting by using unconventional painting tools, such as a fork or potato masher with tempera paint or adding salt to watercolor color paintings. Then, take the large sheet and cut into smaller squares for individual cards.
Donate as a Family
The holiday season offers lots of opportunities to give back. At Pinnacle, “Adopt A Family” kicked off last week with gift options for families at Vista del Camino and foster children from Foster Alliance. Families who selected an angel from the tree will return gifts by December 11th. Take your child with you to shop or select a special gift for another child, and include them in the spirit of giving.
There are family-friendly events with gift collections also! This Friday, December 5th, Scottsdale Quarter is hosting Fill Santa’s Sleigh from 5:30-7:30 PM. Families can bring an unwrapped gift for Foster Alliance and enjoy a fun time together with hot chocolate, live music, character appearances, and a kid craft.
Not all donations have to come with a price tag. Spend some time with your child going through their gently used clothes, books, and toys to give away for another child to enjoy.
Read Together
Books are always a wonderful place to start when introducing or reiterating these values for children. Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig and The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein are timeless classics for children’s books on gratitude. (Check out The Giving Tree of the Desert by Danielle Fradette for a desert twist!) For additional recommendations, here is a helpful list of children’s books on gratitude.
At times, December can feel like an overwhelming blur of materialism and consumer overload. Hopefully, these ideas can help to continue the focus of gratitude from Thanksgiving and weave generosity and giving into your holiday season!