Happy Birthday Jesus Party

A friend and I organised a Happy Birthday Jesus Party this week. I like to try to keep our focus on Christ instead of on us and stuff in this season. So a Happy Birthday Jesus Party seemed a great way to do this. It is so easy in this season to be distracted by parties, presents, shopping and cooking. All of these things are a part of celebrating Christmas and are a lot of fun, but they can easily steal our eyes, hearts and minds from the true meaning of Christmas which is JESUS.

So my friend and I organised this party to honour Jesus. We sent out invitations, we decided how we would honour Jesus with this party...and this is what we did.

I had collected Christmas recipes in a little exercise book and was delighted to stumble across a recipe that I had collected years before. And I decided that this recipe would be the perfect cake to honour Christ and remind us all about the message of the Gospel.

This cake was round because Jesus was born into a world that was round.

This cake's first layer was brown for our sins.

This cakes second layer was red for Jesus's blood shed for our sins.

This cake's third layer was green for life, which is ours in our new heart.

The icing was white which stood for Jesus's purity and righteousness.

This cake had a border of candy hearts which represented each one of us standing a s witnesses for Jesus around the world.

This cake had a gold star in the middle which was the star of Bethlehem, that led the wise men to Jesus. The star had six points which represented the star of David, which represented the Jewish nation in which Jesus was born.

The star had a yellow border which represented the grace of God encircling us.

The cake had a red candle placed in the centre of the star which represented Jesus.

We lit this candle and we read the Christmas story from a kids book called 'Christmas with Night-Light' by Susan Lingo. I chose a kids book because we had a large group of kids attending.

As we read the story, the kids used a knitted nativity and a cardboard stable set to re-enact the story of Christmas.

This book is set up so that after every couple of pages there are two Christmas carols. My friend played the piano and so during the story of Christmas we would break to sing a verse of each carol. The carols continued the theme of the part of the Christmas story we were up to.

When we had finished reading the Christmas story we all lit our candles out of Jesus's candle. We all then sang Happy Birthday to Jesus, blew out our candles, and pulled party poppers.

We then shared in Jesus's birthday cake. I love that we were able to draw our families eyes back to Jesus in this season.

We finished off Jesus's party with a shared meal of sausages and salad. It was wonderful fellow shipping with each other in this wonderful season and bringing Jesus back to the centre of Christmas.