Next week is General Conference and I’m here to ask you three things:
- Do you have preparing-for-general-conference traditions?
- If so, do you and your family like them?
- If you don’t have conference prep traditions, would you like to experiment with some ideas or are you happy without having any traditions that help you and your family prepare for conference?
First of all, let me say this: regardless of traditions you may or may not have, your attitude about conference will rub off on your kids. Actions speak louder than words. If you’re excited about it, they will notice. If you’re not, they will notice! So, attitude trumps traditions in my mind. How do you feel about conference? How do you talk about it?
Second, I’m a big fan of simplicity. When I talk about preparing-for-conference traditions, I’m certainly not talking about spending weeks making a 5 foot sculpture of the conference center. I’m talking about things like taking the pictures of the Church leaders out of the middle of a conference Ensign and taping the paper on your wall by the dinner table. Then you can talk about things you know about or have learned from specific leaders during meals.
When conference comes around, what do you do? One of my friends used to have a sock matching fest with her family during conference. She has twelve children and socks often pile up. So she thought, “Hey, we’re all sitting together for hours during conference. Let’s multitask and match the socks!” When she mentioned this “tradition” to her mother-in-law, her mother-in-law wondered if that activity was fun for the kids and helped them look forward to conference or if it had the opposite effect. My friend realized in an instant that her “great idea” was great if her goal was to get the socks matched, but maybe not so great if her goal was to help her kids enjoy conference. She decided to try printing out some age-appropriate conference games and activities that the kids got excited about. And the socks could wait.
I’m actually not pushing for you to make any traditions unless you want to. I’m just asking you to take a moment and pause and see what you’d like to do in time for you to do it. I’m not sure I have any specific traditions that we do every year other than talk about conference the week before it happens. Sometimes I put the pictures up and sometimes I print out things for the kids to do. I just go with the flow. However, I do share my enthusiasm and things I’ve learned in the past. And I know my looking forward to conference is a testimony in itself.
So, for FHE tonight, we’ll be talking about the upcoming conference. If you don’t have FHEasy yet, you can sign up for the free lesson on the right sidebar. Right now, the free lesson I’m offering is “Spring Conference” so it’s especially timely. For FHE next week, we’ll talk about what stood out to us during conference and do something out of the Spring Conference lesson that we didn’t do this week.
Happy Home Evenings
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