So the video I wanted to make never turned out and so I started wondering if maybe it wasn’t supposed to be made. It happens, right? So instead, before sundown at the beginning of our “Season of Joy” I made this video encouraging parents who don’t know what to do but need to start making memories!

Let’s face it, we enjoyed Christmas and Easter, they were our times of great happiness – but then something happened. We found out about the Feasts of the Lord and desired to keep them with God – but the Bible really says almost nothing about how to to it. “Eat. drink. Don’t work. Worship with goodly branches. Build a Sukkah and dwell in it for 7 days.”

Can I be honest here? I wasn’t enjoying anything except the tent fort we made in the basement in frigid Minnesota! Why? Because Christmas and Easter were enjoyable because they were about shared family memories – something we didn’t know how to reconnect with in the Biblical Feasts because we felt like we started the race too late to even bother putting on our sneakers.

This year something changed and I looked at the experts who have been faithfully keeping these feasts for over 3000 years – the Jews. They go nuts enjoying this holiday, they look forward to it all year. I want that joy, and so this year I started looking into why and we changed some things about what we are doing, and involved the kids (who are now 15 and tower over me). I will share what we have learned over the course of the next year and next week so that you can prepare to celebrate the Feasts joyfully as well. But as for this year, I wanted to release this video about making memories and not feeling bad about starting small in keeping this very wonderful commandment.

Now, for fun, this is one of my favorite Maccabeats videos, I always laugh when I watch it:

This is a strange thing to be teaching to kids, so I hope that you will preview it before having them watch it. I am going to teach about what self-denial means by looking at the original Hebrew wording and a parallelism in Isaiah 58. I don’t teach doctrine to kids normally, but I have a lot of parents asking me about helping their kids understand the meaning of the Feasts and how to observe them, so this year I will be explaining what the scriptures call “self-denial” or the “affliction of our souls.” I am also going to talk about the importance of genuine repentance in our lives and how it can change us for the better and help us to grow up.

Click on the blue text for a link to a worksheet to help you understand parallelisms better:

Now is the time to start thinking about Bible Curriculum for those of you who are either new to the yearly Torah cycle (Genesis through Deuteronomy in a year) or want a more structured way to teach it to your kids. My dear sister Sarah Hawkes Valente has updated her already awesome Lessons in Yeshua’s (Jesus’s) Torah for school age and younger kids. It comes complete with lessons, questions, craft ideas and coloring pages. It’s a great way to introduce kids to Torah for the first time.