Instant Christmas

We were faced with the dilemma that plagues Christians everywhere. How could we get our family—and ourselves—into the true spirit of Christmas? Last year the pictures of full-time missionaries on our meetinghouse bulletin board gave us inspiration for our best solution yet.

We began early in October with a lesson about the importance of missionary work. Then we explained our Christmas idea: to send gift packages to each missionary whose picture was on the bulletin board.

The children were enthusiastic, but were unsure of what to include in the packages. The missionaries serving in our area gave us an idea about what to send when we happened to serve instant pudding to them for dessert one night.

“This is wonderful,” they said. “We wish we could afford it.”

That was all the children needed to hear. They decided to fill the Christmas packages with instant pudding mixes, cookie mixes, rolls of candy, and homemade Christmas tree ornaments. We would also send each missionary a Book of Mormon in the language of the country where he or she was serving, complete with our family picture and our testimony in that language. (We could call on ward members and friends who spoke different languages to help us translate our testimony.)

Each family home evening for the next few weeks was devoted to a different step in preparing the packages. We began with a short lesson on a gospel topic, then spent the rest of the time working on the packages.

Although our project was a success, we learned some things that will make it go more smoothly in the future. This year we will start earlier—some of our packages arrived months after Christmas. We will visit a Church bookstore to get our foreign language copies of the Book of Mormon while we’re on our vacation this summer. We’re already saving boxes, and we’ll mail our packages in mid-October.—Tan A. Summers, Metairie, Louisiana