25 DaYs Of ChRiStMaS - Day 19

Day 19 - Sharing the Love

Last night Allie and I went to a mother/ daughter Christmas party.  It was fun to get out with my girl and spend the evening together.  What really made it special was what we did...

The mother & daughter that hosted the party are new friends of ours from Allie's new school.  Their names are Anna & Madeline.  For 8 years they have adopted a family at Christmas then invited their friends with daughters the same age as Madeline to go in together for gifts for the family that they adopt.  Before Christmas each year, the mothers and daughters get together to wrap the gifts that they have all bought at a Christmas party hosted by Anna & Madeline.  

This year, several months ago, Anna & Madeline's neighborhood decided to raise money and build a Habitat For Humanity house.  It sounds like they had great participation, and after all of the neighborhood garage sales, kids' lemonade sales, and donations were made they had raised enough money to build TWO Habitat houses.  The people from their neighborhood are  actually the ones that built the houses.  (How cool is that?!?)  Earlier this month they presented the houses to two single mothers and their children.  Those families are the ones that Anna & Madeline adopted for Christmas this year.  One of the mothers said that she had told her kids that their new house was their Christmas gift this year... they were thankful for that and expecting nothing more.  Oh!  How excited they will be when gifts that match their ages and interests show up!  Anna's family will be delivering them soon.  

So last night Allie & I went to Anna & Madeline's house and met a lot of new people, got to know some people better, wrapped a lot of gifts, wrote a letter to the family that we were assigned to, and were thoroughly blessed that we got to be a very small part of a very huge blessing.