My oldest daughter recently turned eight years old and our church has started to have activities for young people her age. Elise loves to attend and enjoys the games and listen to the Bible teaching.
When I picked her up last Friday, I asked, “So, what did you learn about tonight?”. Her answer: “We talked about contentment and how Paul and Silas were content, even though they were locked in prison for teaching about Jesus.” (You can read the story in Acts 16:22-30.)
On Monday, I wrote about the sociology of the first few stages of Christmas gift giving.
These stages are not meant to be exhaustive, there are all kinds of idiosyncratic changes that many of us could make based on differing Christmas traditions, blended families, differing socio-economic status and a host of other factors. Also, many of us might experience several of these stages at the same time when dealing with different branches of the family tree.
Here is the second half of the list:
I follow a few personal finance bloggers via Twitter, one of whom is Money Crashers. Last weekend Money Crashers hosted an #MCchat where the discussion revolved around Christmas, especially the family gift-giving aspect of the holiday.
The social media exchange piqued quite a few thoughts about gift giving. I thought I would put on my sociologist hat and share some of those thoughts. I think that most families go through similar stages of gift giving at Christmas. Each stage of life presents new challenges for the tradition and even different possibilities for offense and hurt . . .
