Ten Ways for Christmas

Top Ten Ways to Make Christmas Meaningful for Your Family

1. Find a favorite Christmas story and make it a tradition to read it aloud on Christmas Eve.

2. Share your good fortune with others at Christmas by volunteering as a family for a charity or non-profit organization that’s close to your hearts.

3. Decorate your home each year with a special item that you’ve chosen or made as a family.

4. Choose your favorite holiday baking recipes and share an afternoon with friends and family baking up a storm.

5. Create a calendar with a different family photo each month to send to family and friends who can’t be with you during the year.

6. Plan an annual family activity for the Christmas season: It could be picking out the tree, tobogganing down a nearby hill, even heading to the local zoo—anything that captures the whole family’s interest.

7. Light the candles of an Advent wreath in succession every Sunday during December, talking about their symbolic meanings, such as love, hope, peace, and joy.

8. Buy or make a special tree ornament each year for the children in your family, and present them with the whole set when they have their own tree for the first time.

9. Turn letters to Santa into an event, with hot chocolate, cookies, and plenty of colorful pens and stickers to help with the letter writing.

10. Make writing thank-you letters for gifts a much-loved tradition, too, with yummy treats and a fun reward when the letters are finished.

Creativity - for the gifted only?

How creativity can serve you in areas of your life that have nothing to do with art, music, or science.

First, in the domain of business, the economic downturn of the past several years has hit small businesses, large corporations, and individual contractors. If your business is going to fight the uphill battle of survival, you need to find creative ways to cut costs while maintaining quality, provide an innovative product or service rather than the same old product that your competitors are providing, and invent ways to create or maintain market share.

If your business has already succumbed to the economic downturn, you need to be creative in reinventing your professional life, whether it’s using skills you already possess to market yourself or developing a new set of skills to enter an entirely new business or profession. Reinventing your professional life takes creativity and courage. But it can be one of the most rewarding enterprises of your life.

Second, in the domain of family you may be one of millions of parents who are faced with the dilemma of how to pass on family values to children who live more harried lives than most adults did just a generation ago. How do you communicate with a child who, despite your best efforts, is wired 24/7 to an iPod, Facebook, IM, and Grand Theft Auto? How do you impart a sense of balance to a child who is constantly bombarded by media that equate self-worth with anorexic thinness, pleasing a man in bed, or having the athletic prowess of a superhero? You can do it—but as a parent, you need every ounce of creativity you can muster to compete with electronic gadgets and today’s sensationalized media agenda for your child’s attention and subsequent welfare.

Speaking of which, how do you keep yourself balanced when there are so many demands on your time and personal resources? To maintain your energy—and your sanity—you need to find creative ways to manage your time so that you can juggle the demands of modern existence while still ensuring that your hours and days remain rich and meaningful.

In short, creativity is important for artists, writers, musicians, and inventors; but it is also crucial for societies, businesses, and individuals who need to juggle fulfilment with the demands of the rapid-change culture. You not only need to be creative to enhance your life, you also need to be creative to survive.

[Source: Your Creative Brain Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life]