Christmas Caroling

Last night at youth group we set our 6-12th graders Christmas Caroling in the community. This is also an annual tradition but in recent years we've seen less high school kids, until last night, when we had another strong showing. Part of the difficulty is that our youth group typically meet at 6:30 pm, which is late to begin caroling as businesses close and elderly people (our typical targets) are going to bed. So during this event we move the time up to 5:00 pm for a pizza dinner, then spend some time organizing into small groups and most groups are out of the door by 5:50, giving them a full two hours to carol.

We purposefully included 6th graders into our event last night in part because we've been trying to establish a 678 monthly group that gets together for fun and service projects. the 6th graders feel very young to high school seniors, but when we have enough people in total, you hardly notice the difference. To make this a success, I felt we needed to have some intentional mixing of older and younger kids in each car load, and then several cars traveled together on a specified route throughout the evening. So to begin with I asked each student to find a partner that they wanted to be with, and then I paired up these partners to make groups of 4 and 6. Several groups found themselves in packs of 3, which was acceptable and mingled with other 3-packs to form cars of 6.

We didn't ask the kids to sign up in advance, which is always very difficult, but worked out just fine. I did have 3-4 extra drivers, but they were happy to ride along and help sing.

To make this event over the top we also hosted a text message scavenger hunt while caroling. As a group they wrote down who was in their car and a cell number they wanted to have instructions texted to, and I sent about one instruction every 12 minutes. Last year I organized a picture taking scavenger hunt during caroling, but it was frustrating because some cars would spend too much time taking photos and make the other cars wait, so this year I tried to make everything able to do in a car while driving. It worked much better than the photos and still had some silliness involved. The scavenger hunt also allowed kids to have some reason to come back and share stories/creations/songs with each other.

All the groups were excited to begin with, but I would guess that only half the groups really followed through and participated. For various reasons (they were having too much fun, they felt too rushed, they were in nursing homes first and therefore unavailable to access supplies) some groups opted out, which was fine. The groups that participated, got really into it, creating a song, a craft made out of things found in their car, solving puzzles, singing Christmas songs... it was a good thing to do and didn't make anyone feel left out, only added fun when it needed to be added.

By far the best part of the caroling was hearing stories from each group as they returned. there were heart-warming moments, lots of laughter, and all kinds of sweet examples of the joy that our kids brought to nursing homes and shut-in across the city.