Christmas Party? Already?!

Yesterday after church I had an Enrichment Committee Meeting (I'm not the president!) to plan for the next few upcoming activities. It seems like Enrichment Committee has become more than just the regular activities, and has exploded into much more. We now do the four quarterly activities and the weekly groups, also the Enrichment 101 and Service Groups. (I'll explain these later.) But needless to say, we're staying busy as a group!

When everyone arrived, Susan (our President) handed out the itinerary for the meeting. I briefly ran my eyes over it. When they fell upon the last item, my jaw dropped and I think I started sweating. "Christmas Enrichment Meeting Planning" - What?! Christmas already??? I've barely had time to recover from last years activity!!! (Even though it's a lot of work, I'm really excited about it.) Last year our theme was, "An Instrument in the Lord's Hand". We had a slide presentation of women in the church, scriptural and modern day, to the music of "Beautiful Savior". We had a lot of beautiful music, and a wonderful program with a speaker who talked about being an instrument in the Lord's hand, and how we should embrace ourselves as women. There wasn't a dry eye in the room. It was perfect, and it's going to be hard to top but we're going to try. I'm petitioning all of you for ideas. We don't have a theme yet, but I would love to know what other Christmas Enrichment activities that you have been to that have been successful. Any and all ideas are welcome!!! :)

We are also implementing a bunch of new groups which I'm really excited about! The first we are calling Enrichment 101. What things would you like to learn? Be careful what you suggest, because you're responsible for planning it! We'll see how well it works out, but I'm looking forward to it. Being recently newly married (I can still say that after three years right?) I still have a lot of things that I go to my mom for help with. Example: I never wanted to learn how to sew as a teenager, but now it's important to me! Or cooking, meal planning, home canning, emergency preparedness, food storage, and gardening - when did I become an old lady? I have an idea that I may end up planning a lot of these since I'm the one who wants to learn about all of this. Go figure. :) Let me know if you have any ideas for these activities as well, I always love suggestions.

We've also been bouncing around ideas about "Service Groups". It's something that a few wards have been implementing around us, and it's becoming very popular and effective. Essentially, you convince people to join the service groups, and put them into 4 person groups. Everyone provides service for everyone else. Like, I just painted my floor so I would have invited my group over to help. And then the next person in the group would need something so we would all go to help her, and on and on until all four people have been served and had served. It started as a way to get the women in the ward to fellowship with an act of service - knowing that service draws women together. The groups are formed by very careful prayerful consideration which is a huge part of it too. So far, the Fishers 2nd ward has started it and after the first few groups, word of mouth has attracted many other women to join. I'm so excited to start, but we are still ironing out the details.

We're planning on rolling out these two new groups on September 30th, so I hope all of the other women are as excited as we are.

Let me know if you have any suggestions about these ideas, we're so excited to get them rolling!