A Good Use For Those Photo Christmas Cards

It may be too late for some of you to use this idea, but if you haven’t thrown away all those photo Christmas cards yet, I’ll tell you what we do with them...

I started doing this a couple of Christmases ago when we received an abundance of photo Christmas cards from friends and family. I didn’t want to throw them away, but the front of our refrigerator lacked the space for so many lovely photos. I LOVE getting the Christmas photo cards! It’s so fun to see our friends and family, many of which we haven’t seen in years except for that Christmas card photo each year in December. (Well, thanks to Facebook that’s not entirely true anymore...we get to see pictures of our friends much more often than we use to!) 

Seeing them each year brings back fond memories of times spent with the people they display and always serves as a great reminder to pray for them. So a couple of Christmases ago I decided to save them and put them in a mini photo book (some of them have to be trimmed down to fit inside) and we use them throughout the year as a reminder to pray for our friends and family, kind of like the 'Pray For ____' Missionary Cards that a lot of churches have. We’ve made it a part of our school day to pray for a specific person or family each week and it has become one of my favorite parts of the morning. The kids love to look through the book and see pictures of their friends from the different places we’ve lived and see all of our extended family as well. It’s always exciting and fun to see who will be next for the week and I think it’s been a great reminder for all of us to remember to think of other people. It’s so easy to get self focused and only lift ourselves up or our immediate family when we pray. I hope that as we continue to do this it will help the kids to keep their focus outward and remember to think of others and their needs more often. 

So this Christmas we saved them all and today Joy helped me finish trimming some of them down and putting them in our album. 

If we already have the family in there than we just slide the new picture on top. And don't worry if you haven't sent us a Christmas photo card...you might still be in there! :) We've printed off pictures of family members and friends that we've gotten through email or Facebook and added them to our book. 

Anyway, it's been a really neat thing for our family and I thought I'd share. It is truly precious to hear your kids lift other people up to the Lord and pray with such innocence and faith. Sometimes I have to write down some of the sweet things they say because it's so honest and simple and from the heart and no adult could have prayed it better.  =)

I've wondered many time wether to let people know when we are praying for them that week. Sometimes I've really felt like we should but most of the time we don't mention anything. Here's a picture of what we do with them during school time for the week...On Monday we added Jenny and Josh to the prayer pocket on our morning board...

The pictures are in random order and we just go through them one after the other throughout the year. I think if we didn't have it as a part of our school board then we'd just put it up on the fridge or keep it with our bible or devotional, somewhere where we'd see it everyday and remember to pray. 

Aaaannnnd that's the long version of my fun idea! :) I didn't intend for this to be such a lengthy post. I guess I need to work on my 'short version' explanations!