Advent

By now I'm sure it is time to start putting up my Valentine's Day decorations (not that I have any)-but first I wanted to reflect and put up some posts of our Christmas.

Advent is my favorite time of year.  I love that we can take the entire month of December and daily focus on the Christmas story.  Matt and I really want to teach our children about how God's people waited thousands of years for Jesus to be born, and now we are still in waiting, but for Jesus to return.   Every year we've done Advent candles and/or an Advent calendar with the chocolate inside.  This year we did the candles on our dinner table, but I also added a daily Advent activity where each day we opened an envelope with scripture on it.  So, each day we read a verse or two, and some days we would also open our Bibles and read larger chunks. 

The envelopes were super easy to put together.  I got the idea and the daily scriptures here.

 

 

 Since we're at the mantle, here or some other trimmings...

 (the wreath was not suppose to stay on the mantle...but it did, perhaps next year it will find a better home, afterall this also took me two Christmases to finish:)

Nothing special, just simple and when I took these we didn't have our stockings up yet.

 

 

 Maybe my most favorite Advent tradition is our "Jesus gift".  Since it is Christ's birthday, we work together to get a gift for Jesus.  Jesus said that when we serve the least of these we are serving him. So we look for either a family or person in our community or often we buy gifts through the World Vision catalog (the kids enjoy picking out a chicken, rabbit, school supplies, etc.).  This year we did a Jesus Jar (which I did not photograph...it was a Mason jar), and any extra change or money we had went into the jar.  It was fun to announce "found some money for the Jesus Jar", or ask "where should we put our change today?....Jesus Jar!".  This year we were able to bless a single mom in our community with a grocery store gift card.

Amongst the hustle and bustle of the season, it was great to have some routines to keep us anchored on Christ.-though we are definitely far from perfect and it doesn't always go swimmingly (Nathan did report that he would like his Advent calendar to involve chocolate next time) and we have lots of fun (and struggles) with gifts.  Next, I hope to share more of our Christmas Day.