What have I done for someone today?

Yesterday in church we had a lesson on this talk. I was reminded of the good of doing service and the blessings it can bring not just to the lives of others, but to my life as well. Life is never the best when we're always focusing on ourselves and being selfish, things are better when we can be serving others and thinking about things besides ourselves.
These scriptures were read in the lesson and I thought I'd share them.
Mosiah 2:17
Luke 9:24
Ether 12:28
Alma 30:7-9, 12-13, 31-35
Matt 11:28-30

Another relativly easy and painless way to serve is to donate food to a food drive or food bank. You would need to do a little research to find the food drives in your area, but one that should be everywhere (at least in America) is the Letter Carriers food drive. So if you can spare a can or box (or more) of non perishable food items, especially those high in protine then you should do so. This is the time of year when food drives are prevelent so find one near you!

As for today's Christmas thing, it's Candy Canes. I think I've heard that they're derived from shepherds crooks but I don't really know if that's true. According to wikipedia, it is. Here is another opinion on the subject.

Advent

I'm thinking that I might cut back on my posting and go to every other day, I am loving doing this but I'm also neglecting things that a bit more important.

Anyway today's service opportunity is one that just about everyone is capable of and that is smiling. It may seem silly and too simple to be a service but it brightens people's days to see a smiling face, it might even brighten yours. If you don't feel like smiling you can fake it 'til you make it. At an old job of mine I was quite often in a bad mood and so at someone's advice I worked on smiling anyway and I found that eventually my fake smile turned into a real one and I felt better about life. So smile!
As for something about Christmas I've been wondering about the origins of advent and advent calendars etc. At our house we've always had advent calenders at Christmas time to count down until Christmas, and I suppose that is really the explanation for them, counting down the days until Christmas. Apparently the idea originated in German, a lot of our Christmas traditions seem to have come from Germany. I leaned a different spin on advent calenders when I took German in 8th grade; I'm used to calenders where you do something different each day to mark the passing of the day, we have one where you put ornaments on a tree and another where we move Mary and Joseph towards Bethlehem. The calender that I made in my German class was a wreath with four candles, starting the Sunday after Thanksgiving you light a candle each Sunday until Christmas. This has been a fun tradition for our family, we light the candles and read Christmas books while they burn.

First service opportunity

I've recently started doing something called 'indexing' as a way to serve. For any who may not have heard of indexing, it's a way of making records available in a digital format so that people can use them for genealogy/family history work. This particular site is sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, however people do not have to be members of the church to access the records that they have. When you index you are given a batch of images of records like censuses etc. there will be instructions of what you need to do for each specific batch but you will be reading the records and typing the information you see so that it can made more easily accessible. You have to register to do this and there are various procedures to learn but it's a relatively easy way to serve, there's tutorial for the things you need to do. You can do it at home or where ever you can use a computer, it usually takes about a half an hour, it's a pretty easy way to serve.
As for Christmas traditions, I thought I'd find out more about why we have Christmas trees. I found this site, I don't know how accurate it is but the information is very interesting and is likely at least close to the truth. The general consensus seems to be that the evergreens were a symbol of hope or that life would come again after winters. This site and this one offer some more recent history of Christmas trees.