The Yada Yada Prayer Group Gets Decked Out (30 page)

If done at home with family and friends, plan a festive meal for which various participants help prepare different dishes.

Play!

After the meal, play games that adults and youth can play together—relays, guessing games, icebreakers.

Play charades . . . but instead of using the traditional categories of book title, movie title, song, etc., pantomime events with which everyone is familiar from the preceding year. Agree on categories such as
Happy Event
(demonstrated by pulling one's mouth into a grin with fingers),
Sad Event
(pull mouth down into a frown),
Crazy Event
(circling fingers around ears),
Scary
Event
(holding eyes exceptionally wide with hands),
God's
Provision
(fingers raked down over one's head like falling rain), etc. Other gestures may follow the game's typical sign language. (Google “charades” on the Internet for examples.) No words or sounds may be spoken. No letters may be “drawn” in the air to spell out a word. Rather than dividing into teams, each player can take a turn portraying an event while everyone else guesses. Little ones may need an adult's help.

Reflect!

Before midnight arrives, explain some of the background of Watch Night services as mentioned earlier in the “Reflect” section. Read Mark 13:28–37, in which Jesus told how we can recognize when the time for His return is approaching and encouraged us to be ready by watching and praying. (You may want to use the King James Version, which uses that language.)

Sing!

Sing songs about God's faithfulness, either from a hymnal or some of the contemporary praise and worship songs.

Commit!

Invite individuals to renew their commitment to the Lord as they prepare to enter the New Year. This could be a spontaneously worded commitment with a particular focus, or, for the younger ones, it might reiterate these words from Joshua 24:15: “But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord” (NIV).

As each person makes a commitment, let him or her light a candle and put it in a candleholder on a table or plant it in a bed of sand in a large pan. The more candles, the brighter the light.

Bless!

An alternative (or an addition) might be to pray blessings on the children and teenagers as the parents light a candle for each one. For inspiration, read Mark 10:13–16, imagining
what Jesus might have said as He took the children into His arms, placed His hands on their heads, and blessed them.

Ring in the New Year!

At midnight, ring in the New Year by letting everyone ring a bell, jingle keys, shake a tambourine, or tap lightly on a glass with a spoon.

Conclude the evening by singing “This Little Light of Mine.”

Sing all the usual verses and make up your own:
“All around my
neighborhood/ With all my friends/ Every day in school/ When I go
to work,
etc
. . . . I'm going to let it shine! Let it shine, let it shine, let
it shine!”

Recipes

* metric conversion on page 246

Jodi's Hungarian Chicken and Dumplings

Jodi's not Hungarian, but who cares? It's all that paprika! When the
weather gets cold, the Baxter clan starts clamoring for chicken and
dumplings, the perfect cold-weather comfort food.

1 chicken, cut up, or eight pieces