Hello

I thought I'd start a thread on the feasts and making them special with kids. I know for us its been a steep learning curve changing from our old pagan ways to our new celebrations. I've been really concious of how we can make the feasts special without them becoming mere replacements for the celebrations we have abandoned. As we've learnt more we've been able to explain things better to the kids but finding stuff to symbolise each day without things becoming rituals is quite difficult. We bought a few books in the early days about the feasts and how they fit into Christianity but they all seem quite obsessed with the Jewish meaning of the feasts so somewhat miss the point.

Anyway I'll start off with one feast and then we can add others into the discussion as we go along so this doesn't turn into an essay!!

Tabernacles: This is the one our kids look forward to the most. We have our present giving at this feast and this year gave the kids 1 or 2 gifts every day for the 7 days. We also invited our families round for special meals and both sets of parents and my brother and his family came. We gave them all gifts as well and told them we were giving them gifts now instead of for Christmas. My sister in law was amazingly lovely and bought gifts for us for tabernacles instead of Christmas which was really cool. We talked a bit about tabernacles whilst we ate and gave them all a short document to take home and read too. The other things the kids love at tabernacles is building a tent. We don't have a garden so we transform their bedroom into a shelter by tying sheets to the bunk beds. We put a mattress on the floor so the girls can sleep in their shelter. And we hang fairy lights around the room which look like stars from inside the tent. We spend time each day in the tent together, talk about tabernacles and what it means and give presents in the tent.

So what ideas do other people have, whether you have kids or not, it would be good to get lots of ideas together :)