Happy Hanukkah!
We LOVE celebrating Hanukkah as a family! We've done it before half-heartedly, but this year we purposed to go all out. We typed up our own Bible study to do each night of Hanukkah, went over the history of the holiday as a family, made all the traditional food, listened to the music, and purposed to try to have people over and involved over the whole 8-day celebration!
In the first part of this post I want to talk about how simple it is to start celebrating this holiday then I want to zoom into the studies we did and how we see Yeshua (that's Jesus' actual name folks!) throughout the WHOLE Bible! My husband lead these studies and had the kids or whoever was joining us that night read the passages out loud. These studies were filled with some serious laughter sessions! Sometimes it took us over an hour to do one of these because we were having so much fun!
Where Do We Start?
(1) Get a Hanukkah Menorah. These Menorah's have 1 Shemash (the servant candle in the center) and 8 branches for the 8 days the oil lasted for the Macabees when they were rededicating the temple.
(2) Know the History: Do a quick study on the history of this holiday.
(3) Know what the Bible Says: Research where the Feast of Dedication is mentioned in the scripture. It's important to realize that Jesus celebrated this holiday as well as read what he said while attending this feast.
(4) Cook some Food: Fried in oil is really the goal. You can make latkes or traditional Hanukkah doughnuts called sufganiyot or just make simple friend doughnuts. We eat a very un-kosher Hanukkah meal (after all we are Gentiles), so we're not too strict on the dairy-meat regulations or even the pork regulations... Just being honest.
(5) Print the Study and Open Your Bibles: At sundown light the shemash, use the she mash to light the first candle, pull out your Bible's and start exploring the Light of the World through all of history!
(6) Play Games and Watch movies: You can play the traditional dreidel game with chocolate coins, or just your normal board games or card games. You can watch movies as a family, dance to music, or just wrestle on the floor.
It's really not that difficult. But the studies are the core of the holiday for us. Even if we don't have time every evening to sit down and play games, we fit the study in before we do anything else.
Why Do This?
Personally, the Lord laid on our heart while we were in Israel this last month to celebrate all the feasts of the Bible with our kids this year. WE have celebrated Hanukkah a little bit our whole marriage, but never fully. We do it simply for the opportunity to teach our kids the deep symbolic meanings of these feasts and how they all mirror Jesus Christ (Yeshua)! It's amazing the amount of wisdom, knowledge, and peace that we've seen our family grow into over this 8-day celebration!
We don't feel we have any religious obligation to celebrate this feast, we simply wanted to use it as a time to teach our children and enjoy a feast that Jesus celebrated. It has so much more meaning then Christmas does in terms of Biblical application.
What If My Husband's Not On Board?
He's the head of the home! Ask him if he's okay with you celebrating it and ask him if he's willing to participate in any degree even if it's just being present. If he's still not feeling it, then let it go. You can still lead your children in a Bible study without celebrating the whole holiday. :)
8-Night Bible Studies:
These are the core to the celebration for our family. Everything else is just icing on the sufganiyot! We easily spend 1-2 hours on these studies and ask questions, cross references verses, bring in the kids memory verses from their CKC books (similar to Awana), and talk about current events, historical events, and prophetic events. It's so rich, yet so simple. Every person receives something from these studies. Our 4-year old all the way to the adults that join us that night.
I attached a PDF copy of what we started with for our studies and some activity ideas for the day. We added to these as we went through them and they'll probably change as the years progress and we make our celebration of Hanukkah our own!
 |
| If you want the full study in PDF just leave a comment below with your email and I will email it to you without publicly sharing your email address. :) |
We learned that Jesus (Yeshua) is the light of the world who has always been since the beginning of Creation. All things are made for Him and through Him and nothing was made without Him. We learned that in Him there is no darkness!
We made traditional jelly doughnuts (Sufganiyot) invited a few friends over, made paper dreidels, had a Big feast, frosted Hanukkah cookies, and watched half of Fiddler on the Roof!
Day Two: Light of Noah
We explored the similarities of Judah Maccabee and Noah standing u for righteousness in a dark time. We learned how Yeshua and the ark that Noah put his faith in are similar. Yeshua is our salvation that hides us from God's (Yahweh's) wrath coming on the earth to judge sin. We talked about what faith is and how we can apply the faith Noah had to our lives.
We made TONS of cinnamon sugar doughnuts, then packed up our feast and shared it at church with our brothers and sisters in Christ!
Day Three: Light of Abraham
We explored Abraham's obedience to Yahweh and his willingness to sacrifice his son, just like Yahweh did with His son Yeshua!
We colored some wooden dreidels, did a questionnaire sheet on Abraham's story, spent time dancing, had a big feast, ate doughnuts, played dreidel then finished watching Fiddler on the Roof.
Day Four: Light of Moses and Israel
We read through the Passover and investigated the parallels between the Passover lamb and Yeshua! We also read about when Moses received the law from Yahweh on Mount Sinai and how the intention of the law was to show us our need for a Savior.
This was Alex and I's date night, so the kids had fun with their babysitter playing games, watching a short movie, and dancing to music.
Day Five: Light of Yeshua: Birth, Life, and Death
We went to my mom and step-dad's house for our celebration this night. We read Isaiah 53 and talked about how that passage was written hundreds of years before Jesus. We broke it down and talked about how it applied to Yeshua. We read through the story of Yeshua's birth, some of death, and His purpose for coming to earth. We went over the gospel message and how we can attain salvation.
My mom and husband set out my mom's Christmas Village, we ate food, cut the kids hair, danced to music, played with toys, and watched movies until late into the night.
Day Six: Light Given to the Jewish People then the Gentiles
We learned about how Yeshua was Jewish and talked about what it meant to become a Jew. We learned that Yahweh chose the Jewish people to be a light in this world. We read that the Jewish people rejected Yeshua as Messiah and salvation was available to Gentiles. We learned what "grafted in" means and looked at the grafted in symbol and talked about what it means for us.
On this night, we laughed so HARD during the study! Aryeh was enjoying himself so much he was just hysterical. He was opening a Bible pretending to read and then at any sign of something funny he was rolling on the ground laughing. Elias fell asleep while sitting up during the study which caused us to laugh even harder. The people we planned to get together with ended up getting sick so it was just us.
Day Seven: Light of Today (Evangelism & Great Commission)
On this night we spent the day making our Hanukkah Window Decorations that I put off until Day 7! Oops!! We did our study and then spent the night watching movies and eating cookies. Nothing too exciting this night. Our plan was to practice sharing the gospel and role play situations with the kids, but we were so wiped out we ended up just going to bed :)
Day Eight: Light of Rapture & Millennium Reign of Yeshua
Our last night was one with two of our dearest little friends and we talked about Yeshua's return! We were anticipating this evening to be a joyous one sharing with the kids what we have to look forward to, but turns out one of the scriptures we read lead to the discussion of the ANti-Christ, mark of the beast, and installment of the one-world religion which lead to fountains of tears!
We shared with the kids that there are believers all over the world being put to death for their beliefs. We also reassured the kids we won't be here when this anti-Christ system is put into motion, however, persecution is a real thing and death is going to come to all of us. But we get to reign and rule with Jesus Christ for all eternity!!!
Oh, the hope we have!
We had a complete blast celebrating Hanukkah this year and plan on doing it every year adding to our family traditions and hopefully bringing others along for the ride with us! Alex already has many ideas and is jotting down things he wants to implement next year!
No comments:
Post a Comment