Putting Christ in Christmas

In an effort to not spend too much money this Christmas we embarked on a big and fun project of creating illustrated Books of Mormon to give to friends and cousins. It is something a friend gave our family when we moved from our house in Orem and we have always thought it was the neatest thing.

First, we took our boxes of old Ensign and Friend magazines. (Which I had only been saving for a project such as this, but had never gotten around to doing it.) We flipped through at least 100 magazines looking for good pictures to use in the scriptures. They had to be a good size, and hopefully correspond with something in the Book of Mormon. There were, of course, many pictures of Christ, but occasionally we'd find something really unique, like Alma the Younger, or Lehi's Dream.


After cutting and cutting, I sorted through all the clippings and arranged them into categories. We ended up with 27 groupings. Then I went through and printed out a paper of corresponding scriptures to go with each category. The hard part was finding scriptures that would space out the pictures nicely throughout the book, instead of clumpings in a certain chapter.


Then we took glue sticks and pasted in the pictures throughout the scriptures. We also marked the scripture that went along with the picture. Now we had an illustrated Book of Mormon with more than 30 pictures to look at.



We've found these to be really useful to bring to church to look at pictures and talk about what is going on. It is always exciting during family scripture study to turn the page and see a new picture as well.

Although it was a lot of work, I really enjoyed making these presents. It was a big learning experience for me to get deeper in the scriptures and make connections between stories and important gospel principles. It really helped strengthen my testimony and turned out to be an easy way to think about Christ during the Christmas season.

Interesting fact: This is the most used picture of Christ in the Ensign,
in various stages of cropping.

Oh - and now I can't open a church magazine without automatically flipping through it and seeing if there are any good pictures to cut out. I hardly even bother with the articles. Guess I'll have to get over that.