As promised, Christmas resources:
TEACHING and LEARNING
Posada is the name for an old Mexican tradition where a couple would dress as Mary and Joseph and visit from house to house. The Church army are using this name for a variety of things to help explore Christmas; you'll find access to various worship and craft ideas here as well as a board game!
Light Live from Scripture Union is a massive collection of free ideas and resources, type "Christmas" into the search and you'll access pages of useful stuff!
Paperless Christmas have produced a road movie in a number of parts to explore the meaning of Christmas.
The Ten ages of Christmas is a piece from the BBC that could be the basis of a useful session exploring what has changed in terms of traditions, but what has remained at the heart of Christmas.
Frontier Youth Trust have posted various ideas at their Young Peoples' Sunday pages, click here and then on Christmas!
A series of ChristmasTalk ideas from Grahame at Insight
It's a Wrap is a four session resource.
The Spikyheaded blogsite have a generous list of free ideas and resources
GAMES AND PARTIES
If you are having a Christmas Party, need music and have an internet connection then I highly recommend Spotify. It's a FREE online music service with access to MILLIONS of tracks. You can pile your chosen tracks into the Play queue and it will then play and play. There is the odd advert but you can eliminate even these by paying 99p for a 24 hour advert-free passport. (One particularly fun album that's a mix of the traditional and fun is by a band called the Barenaked Ladies, called "Barenaked for the holidays!") Enjoy
Christmas Quiz ideas and further ones here (Scattergories) and here (Mixed Up Christmas)
MEDIA and INTERACTION
There is a film coming out which is called Nativity (certificate U) and is a family-friendly film, starring Martin Freeman (The Office, Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy) as a desperate primary school teacher locked in a battle to produce the finest school nativity play in town. It gently explores themes of redemption, reconciliation and the real meaning of Christmas while providing more laughs than an exploding jar of incense. Nativity! is in cinemas from Friday 27th November!
The lovely crew at Damaris provide more details & creative ways of using the film here
Christianity Today with a series of slides exploring a diverse range of Christmas Art
Proost is a great site with some really creative multi media resource. Highlights include the video loop backgrounds to each of the 9 lessons and carols, and the make your own nativity set.
ARTS and DRAMA
A Matchbox Advent Calender idea
In producing this resource page I'd like to thank the network of Diocesan Youth Advisers and especially Ben at Dopcandy
Sorry to mention the C word??
You mentioned the E word earlier and that's 5 months away!! :-)
Ray, thanks for keeping me accountable.
It gets even worse as I'm writing some stuff for next summer now.