Making, Giving & Doing for Others for December

Hello Everyone!

Hope that anyone who has been with family and friends celebrating Thanksgiving, that you had a wonderful time! We had a great time over the last week or so visiting with our family in South Carolina and Florida.
 While we were away, we started to focus on what we wanted to do as a family for the holidays.

While as a family and as a gifted program, we absolutely love the idea of learning about multicultural celebrations, the majority of our family's activities will primarily revolve around Christmas traditions and will focus on the Advent Calendar.
We wholeheartedly embrace the idea of learning and incorporating other seasonal holiday activities into what we have planned for the month, but Christmas is the reason for the season for our family, so many of our tie- ins will revolve around that for the four of us here. 
If your family celebrates Advent and Christmas, we would love to hear what your family does. We feel that the best way to learn is to learn about the traditions and customs from around the world.
What makes December special for your family?
If you are a classroom teacher, what do your do as part of your classroom learning?
If you homeschool, what activities do you have planned?

If your family celebrates a different holiday during the month of December, or if you have additional plans that tie in with Making, Giving, and Doing for Others, we would love to hear about your ideas. Please share what holiday your family or school celebrates as we want to learn from you!
If you homeschool, what activities do you have planned? If you are a classroom teacher, what holiday activities are you going to be doing? We can't wait to hear what you have planned for your special holiday experience!

Hope that you will share your ideas with us!

This past week, while we were sitting at lunch having a bite to eat, Little Bro made the suggestion that each of us in our immediate family choose a special Month of Making, Giving & Doing Activity.

Little Bro wants his Month of Making, Giving & Doing Activity to focus on making & taking cards and handmade gifts to children at a local hospital. He wants to drop off things to area hospitals every Friday.

Big Bro then chimed in with what he wants to do for his Month of Making, Giving & Doing Activity: to donate to Toys for Tots and to Goodwill.

Both boys then discussed the recent events in Ferguson. We had committed over Thanksgiving to helping Natalie, whose bakery was burned down, so we had started the hashtag #CupcakesForNatalie on Twitter and Pinterest. While driving up to South Carolina, I had tweeted and asked people to see if we could rally to help Natalie with the #CupcakesForNatalie hashtag and it ended up trending. We were very happy to hear that two individuals took it a step further and set up a DonorsChoose.org project to help Natalie and other affected businesses.  Thousands of dollars have been raised so far, but we still want to have a personal connection to helping so our boys want to involve the students that come to us as part of our Sunrise Learning Lab program and have them do a project to help Natalie and other businesses and projects that will help Ferguson to rebuild and hopefully, to heal as a community. Thursday will be the Month of Making, Giving & Doing Activity day to focus on helping Natalie, as well as to make things that will encourage others to focus on embracing diversity and showing goodwill towards others. I will be focusing on this, as well as building an extensive Diversity Pinterest Board as a Resource for Parents, Teachers, and Others.
Please Note: 
I will add in links and photos over the course of this month so that you can donate and so that if you want to do something to help, that you and your homeschool or school group can do something too...

Dear Hubby decided that Monday will be his Month of Making, Giving & Doing Activity day.
For his activity, he will handle mailing things out that need to be sent out to different organizations and such, including books for a program in Erie, Pennsylvania.
So as a family, we have plans for every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.
That leaves us with Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday.
Wednesday will be our catch up day and Saturday and Sunday will be our days to just spend time with family and friends and to really focus on the true meaning of Christmas: preparing to celebrate the birth of Christ.

That is our family's plan for December.

We hope to really focus on Making, Giving, and Doing.
In the spirit of making, giving, and doing, we have teamed up with Hoagie's Gifted and have joined this month's Blog Hop to an extent. I did not have my laptop with me while in South Carolina, so instead of writing a full blog post, sent in the link to my Handmade Gifts Pinterest Board and that is what appears on Hoagies Gifted for this month's blog hop. The Blog Hop theme for this month at Hoagie's Gifted is excellent!
Bye Bye Buy Buy:
How can we "do" the holidays without the kids' chorus of "Give me, give me"?  How can we ignore the ads and the stores and the constant bombardment that the less we spend, the less we love our loved ones?  What options are there for our gifted families?
 Source: HoagiesGifted.org
Please be sure to check out the various blogger's posts in the Hoagies' Gifted December Blog Hop.