How do you "Christmas season"?

Have you ever been on LDS SMILE? It's pretty snazzy. Sometimes it's spiritual, sometimes it's funny, and occasionally it's weird but that's okay.

Anywho, so one of their posts came up on my Facebook newsfeed this morning, and it's awesome, so I feel the need to write my own post about it. Disclaimer: I borrow liberally from their content and ideas here. All credit for this post pretty much goes to LDS SMILE. And some to my Relief Society president.

The article is titled "What's Worse Than Anti-Mormons Bashing on Mormons?" Well, Mormons bashing on other Mormons, that's what. They cite examples such as criticism for various Mormon Messages or hate mail received by Al Fox Carraway. There's plenty of bashing by Anti-Mormons going on, but the hateful posts by members of the church are ridiculous. LDS SMILE acknowledges that you have a right to your own opinion - you can dislike something and that's okay - but you don't have to purposefully tear it down. If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.

What does LDS SMILE suggest you do instead? Create your own uplifting content. Find and appreciate the intended message behind others' content, instead of hating on their presentation of the message. (You should go read their post instead of just my summary - it's really good)

To tie in our Relief Society lesson from this past Sunday, uplifting others is a good thing. Our teacher used a children's book about this in her lesson :) The book is titled "Have You Filled a Bucket Today?: A Guide to Daily Happiness for Kids" (Linked to the book's page on  Barnes & Noble, the below is a screenshot of a review on B&N)

Image source

The book says that everyone has an invisible "bucket" (which is pretty much their happiness), and we can either fill other people's buckets by being nice, or we can empty them by being mean. Emptying other buckets does not fill our own, but filling other buckets DOES fill our own!

Cute children's books aside, this is a perfect skill to work on this Christmas season and continue doing so into next year and the year after and your whole life. Christ is our example, right? We're supposed to strive to be Christ-like. And what did Christ do? He served others. He didn't resent serving others, but He did so kindly and with compassion, always putting the needs of others before His own. Do we do this in our own lives? Do we study in the scriptures how Christ served so that we can learn from His example?

It's hard. I'm not good at it yet, but we're here to learn and grow, right? :) (I feel like my posts end up making this point a lot...)

So for Christmas this year, I'm going to focus on being more Christ-like. I challenge you to do the same :)

<3 Marie-Rose