Are you the kind of person who starts decorating for Christmas the day after Halloween or do you wait until after you’ve awoken from your Thanksgiving Day food coma to start putting the lights up? Whatever answer you give, we might suggest that planning for how you’ll celebrate Christmas in your student ministry might start at about the same time.
Are you wondering what to do for your Christmas celebration? Here are three ideas for how to celebrate in your student ministry that can work separately or together depending on what works best for your students!
1. Themed Party
You can pick a wintery theme complete with fake snow decor and other winter-related activities and foods, Christmas movie themed with favorite characters and popcorn, or even hot chocolate themed with a hot chocolate bar and marshmallow games. One idea I love is an Olympic-themed Christmas party.
Here’s what that can look like:
2024 will have an Olympics in it.(We know it’s a summer Olympic year, but it’s still a great inspiration!) So, why not look, eat, and play the part? You can invite your students and volunteers to come dressed in their favorite athletic/athleisure (if you don’t know of it, Google will be your friend on this one). You can decorate your room to mimic some of the glamor of the Olympic opening ceremony.You can buy every winter shaped cookie at your local grocery store. Then, you can group your students together or they can compete as individuals in a mix of winter/holiday/Olympic themed games.
If any of the above sounds great already to you, then make sure that you download our free Christmas party plan to make planning even easier! Even if you don’t do an Olympics party, the theme options are endless!
2. Gift Exchange
Another way to celebrate Christmas would be to host a gift exchange among your students. You can make this more inclusive by giving a budget limit and maybe hinting that these gifts are allowed to be more weird and funny than helpful or meaningful. It might also be a good idea as a ministry to buy a few gifts just to add to the options. Then every person eligible gets a number. They pick their gifts in order of the number they received. What spices gift exchanges up is the ability to “swap” a gift that you’ve already seen with the chance to pick a new gift. Give a gift a swap limit (3 as an example) and watch the chaos and “ohhhhhh”ing ensue!
3. Service Project
Another option for celebrating Christmas with your students would be to incorporate f serving your community into your gathering. That could look like raising money together to go towards an initiative or organization that is making a difference. If you don’t already partner with other organizations, try reaching out to people in your church that might be aware of needs in your community and then find what might be the best option for addressing them. You could even ask students about what organizations and causes they know about or care about!
It would be ideal if it was something that could be done or brought to the Christmas gathering so that the group can compile their efforts together. Whether that’s bringing something they prepared in advance or or working on something together that will be sent somewhere else. Also, if there’s a way to measure what they could be sending away to show the impact of their service, that would add to the impact of the service for the students.
I hope these ideas can be helpful in sparking your creativity for how to celebrate Christmas with your students! Be sure to grab your FREE Christmas party planning download here!
