The Homeschool Minute ~ Hal & Melanie Young

The One-room Schoolhouse? Is anybody out there thinking about school this week? My head is all full of Christmas baking and decorating, cleaning the house for company, getting the last few presents, and shipping Christmas orders. The One-home Madhouse is more like it!

Our struggle this week, like many of you, probably, is to remember this season is about the birth of the Savior, not a huge list of expectations and a billion things to do. So let’s stop a few minutes, maybe brew a cup of tea, and think about what’s really important this week.

Remember stress is like water, it finds every crack in our character. That means it’s easy to be rude to one another or lose our tempers. We can’t skip devotions this week! We’ve got to let the stress make us more Christ-like by dealing with our sin when it gets exposed.

We’ve got to be patient with our children and show delight in them, even when we’re strung out. Our little one totally lost it tonight because she’s decided all she wants for Christmas is a jar of marshmallow fluff and she is sure no one will get her one. Wow. Don’t even know where that one came from, much less the tears over it. It’s hard to be patient when our children aren’t even making sense, but sometimes they just need our attention and reassurance. (She’s back to being her sweet angelic self after some serious mommy hugs, by the way.) Remember stress (good and bad) brings out the struggles of our children, too.

The good can crowd out the best, if we aren’t careful. It’s more important we sing the real Christmas carols with our children, the ancient ones that are full of God’s Word, than it is that we go to yet another Christmas pageant that waters down the gospel–like the municipal tree lighting we went to where the local school sang, “Winter Lights, Night Lights” (If Christmas doesn’t exist, why were they singing?) or the church musical we attended in another city last year that made Jesus sound like a self-help guru. It was gorgeous, but truth is better than pageantry.

This season of wonderful truths, pungent scents, delightful tastes, and lovely sights is a perfect time to build life-long memories for our children. Let’s slow down and take care to share all the really important stories and moments with the sweet blessings God has placed in our home. They’ll be grown up before we know it.

Merry Christmas, friends!

Hal & Melanie

P.S. Only one more day to shop for Character-Building (and FUN) Gifts in our Merry Christmas Shop. Run over there now by clicking here! We’ve got everything from Rubberband Machine Guns to great Children’s Classic Audiobooks!

Check out our blog series on teaching the carols. Click here. Or download our book, Christ-Centered Christmas for loads of great ideas to make the season mean more. Click here.