With Halloween officially over and trick-or-treating done, now we move on to our kids asking about Christmas. Anyone else? My little girl has been asking for things for Christmas and from Santa since August, I swear to goodness.
One thing I am super thankful that we did as parents the past few years is to start teaching our kids about donating our unused items before bringing in new ones. This has helped keep our daughter grateful for the things she gets, but also teaches her how to give back.
At first, she was really sad to be going through her toys and picking what she was going to give away. She wanted to keep everything. We always made it a point to have her go through the items with us, so she would know where they went, along with getting her to understand the idea that giving to others when you have a lot is a really good thing.
After a few times of donating items, she started to understand that other little girls were going to get these donated items and be really happy to have them. That made her want to donate more things, which was a proud mom moment.
Now, if she sees something in the store she wants, she first says that she will give a different toy away to another little girl or boy. I think this is a great tradition to do around the holidays. If your family is anything like my family, the kids get showered with presents each holiday season. Our home does have a decent amount of storage, but we like the idea of donating rather than storing and recycling toys back out. We do keep some toys to store and then pull out at another time, but only the toys we know our little baby will play with eventually and we don’t want to have to rebuy those items.
So, with the holiday season coming back around, we will take a day to pull together all the toys and books in the house, look through them, sort out what we want to donate, and then tell our little girl that now Santa has room to bring her new presents.
Another really cute idea that I heard from my sister-in-law is to put the bagged donations on the porch and have Santa come for them the next morning. So, Santa would be taking the donations to other kids and bringing the new toys.
I thought that was a really cute way to get kids in the donating spirit.
Either way, I think donating around the holidays is important and if we can teach our kids to do it young, than that is awesome!
ANN BURNS is a Morgantown native, raising two young children with her husband, Drake. She writes weekly columns for The Dominion Post. Contact her at Columns@DominionPost.com.
