Righteous Traditions Family Home Evening

My friend and Relief Society teacher Hannah (She's awesome!  Check out her blog!)gave an excellent lesson last week in RS.  It was on creating righteous traditions in our homes.

She did a great job of incorporating the sisters in the ward by asking a few of them to share some of their righteous traditions in the areas of Sabbath day observance, family prayer, family scripture study, service and activity in the Church, and patterns of respect and loyalty in the home.

Hannah also gave out a great chart for us to fill out righteous traditions that we have, that we see in others, and that we would like to improve on.  I heard lots of great ideas from my sisters in the ward and decided that Derek and I would do this for FHE the next day.

It's unusual to find an activity that works well with just the two of us.  We often feel silly or awkward when we have a formal FHE with an opening and closing prayer (We dispense with the song.  Derek doesn't like to sing and I refuse to do a solo!).  But we know it's something we need to do.

Anyways, the FHE was a smashing success!  Thank you Hannah!  It took us a while to get our creative juices flowing and think of new (or new to us) righteous traditions for our home.  Most of the ones we thought of had a lot to do with Sunday things like cleaning the house BEFORE Sunday, cooking a large meal and having it to eat througout the week or sharing with someone, reading the next week's lesson, or writing an e-mail or letter to family or friends.  But the one that I'm most excited for is our new food storage tradition.

We decided that it would be a good, righteous tradition to start buying just one extra food storage item each grocery shopping trip we go on.  That way we can be building up our stores without feeling too overwhelmed.

So far, it's worked out great!  We went on our first grocery shopping trip and got extra powdered milk.  We use it often in cooking anyways so we got a huge box of it while we were at Costco.  Half of it is for current use, the other half is for food storage.  It wasn't at the cheapest price we could have bought it at, but it was a great brand so we know it's quality.  And it was still cheaper than buying a gallon of regular milk!

The FHE picture is from a great LDS resource website I found through a Google image search, www.sugardoodle.net.  For a FHE lesson index, click on the picture.  For some reason, I couldn't find it when I went through their new website.