This is a great time of the year to have the women in your church share some of their personal family and holiday traditions. This can be presented as an evening event or a Saturday workshop/conference.

Evening event – Send out invitations to the women in your church asking them to attend the event and bring a traditional holiday salad or dessert to share. You can also ask them to bring the recipe for their dish, copy them, and create a holiday recipe book to pass out at Christmas.

Pre-select 2-4 women who will share a Thanksgiving, Advent, or Christmas tradition. Have them share about the tradition, how they plan it, and present any objects or crafts that they do or use. Plan on their taking approximately 20 minutes each, 10-15 minutes to share and 5-10 minutes for questions.

Presentation Example: Our family makes gingerbread houses to decorate for Christmas on Thanksgiving day afternoon, while our men watch football. When I share this tradition, I present my gingerbread recipe, copies of my directions and house templates, as well as display a completed gingerbread house. I briefly described the directions and share how the tradition had evolved and how much fun we have had as nieces, nephews, aunts, and grandmother have each created their own masterpieces.

Suggested Schedule:
7:00-7:30 pm - welcome, prayer and food
7:30-7:50 pm - presentation 1
7:50-8:10 pm - presentation 2
8:10-8:30 pm - presentation 3
8:30-8:50 pm - presentation 4 or allow women in the group to briefly share their holiday traditions.

Saturday Workshops/Conference – Set-up similar to the evening event, this idea simply takes the smaller presentations and turns them into hands-on workshops. Depending on the amount of women you have attending, you can repeat the workshops each session and rotate the women through in groups, or if you have a small group, have them present one at a time and everyone participates together.

Workshop Example: I could present my gingerbread house tradition, and have the women make miniature gingerbread houses by covering small milk cartons with frosting, graham crackers and candy.

Suggested schedule:
10:00 - 10:15 am – Welcome
10:20 - 11:00 am – Workshops
11:05 - 11:55 am – Workshops
12:00 - 12:55 pm – Salads and Desserts
1:00 - 1:40 pm – Workshops
1:45 - 2:00 pm - Closing

I know that many of you have a lot of experience planning events and will be able to take these ideas and run with them. Some of you might like some more information and I would recommend the following books:

Based on: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Matthew 6:19-21

We asked the ladies to pre-register for the event and charged $5 per person. We had several women who donated extra money to help cover the cost of those who could not afford the fee. (We simply asked each woman to put her registration and her money into a box in the foyer and if finances were a problem to just put their registration in – we do this for all our paid events and have always seen the Lord provide more money than registrations!)

Pre-planning: Before the event we spent an afternoon making the decorations and training our team leaders.

Refreshments: we used ½ of the money we collected to purchase veggie, cheese, and meat platters from a local grocery store. We also purchased crackers and ingredients to make punch. A woman In our church who bakes for a living donated a bunch of yummy gourmet cookies.

Decorations: we wanted to keep it simple and used brown and gold construction paper to make treasure chests filled with gold hearts. We embellished them with shiny gold craft paint. We also made large flat hearts for the doors and walls, and small three dimensional ones for each table. We rented a real treasure chest with faux jewels and coins from a local novelty store. They charged us $20 for the chest and then donated 100 faux crowns for us to give out to the ladies.

Program: We did this on a Saturday afternoon and the ladies arrived at 3:30 pm We sorted them into teams and gave each woman a crown to wear during the hunt. Each team leader drove a van with her ladies and we asked all the teams to be back at the church by 5:00 pm. The treasure hunt was a “bigger and better” hunt. We gave each team a matchstick and they had to go to homes and businesses trying to trade for something bigger and better. (Example: one team traded their match for a towel, then traded their towel for a 6’ ficus tree! They then traded their tree for a painting, etc. They ended up with beautiful custom painted ceramic pitcher. We saved all the nice items to use as door prizes at our retreat.)

When the teams arrived back at the church we prayed and let them eat and visit for a while. One of our team leaders is a born comedienne and we asked her to do a funny skit about some of the things the women had collected. (Even if your church is small, you probably have someone with a personality like this... ask her to do it! How do you think Chonda Pierce got started?!) Our Sr. Pastor’s wife then gave a testimony about how she had learned and was still learning her “Matthew 6” life lesson.

We wrapped it up around 6 pm and had to chase the women out of the building – we had a blast!

Deborah Lovett, Speaker, Author and Founder of Women of the Well Ministry, invites you to sign up for the free Weekend Water from the Well e-mail devotional at www.womenofthewell.org so you too can be refreshed by the Living Water each weekend!

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