I love Advent.
It is such a wonderful time of the year.
A time of anticipation for the birth of Jesus.
With commercialism these days,
it is so easy to forget the true meaning of Christmas.
I pray that my children will have fond memories of Advent as a period of the year in which we spent a lot of time doing things as a family, going out of our way to help others, spending more time in the Bible, reflecting on our year and making plans for the next.
Now that Bear is two and can understand more, I feel it is very important to start traditions that will help build those memories and that will emphasize all that is important to my husband and I at Christmas.
Here is the plan.
Each day of Advent, Bear will open up a little felt envelope in which she will find her Jesse tree ornament and verse/prayer card. I got the verse cards from Tired, Need Sleep, but made my own watercolor ornaments as my printer is still useless.
She will also find a card with an activity (not in the order listed) that we will do as a family and a piece of yarn to make the soft bed for Baby Jesus who will be placed in the manger December 25th.
We will also light our Advent wreath after dinner each night and revisit the verse/prayer card from the morning.
What are your Christmas or Holiday traditions? If you have a post about it, feel free to add it to the MckLinky. Please include a link back to me in your post. This MckLinky is open until December 5th.
love it! So you are Catholic too?! It is nice to have some Catholic mommies with AWESOME blogs on here! I look forward to reading what you do this Advent... I am just starting to come up with ideas for my little ones.
ReplyDeleteThanks!
What a great way to start what sounds like will be a wonderful tradition. I've also just started a Christmas McLinky, but more for crafts, baking and things. :)
ReplyDeleteBoy you are on top of things. I just started looking at Christmas ideas today. I want to do some kind of Advent Calendar but I am not sure exactly what yet. My husband is Catholic and would like to start passing some of the traditions on to the boys. I will link back when I get started.
ReplyDeleteWe are going to do the Jesse Tree too! I just purchased and downloaded Ann Voscamp's Glorious Coming and I'm scanning everywhere I can trying to figure out which items to use for the Jesse Tree. And I've got the tree -- they made one at childcare earlier this year that I'm going to put on the wall.
ReplyDeleteIt's getting late, so we're just going to have paper ornaments to put on the wall (I need to find sticky tack. Or maybe we'll use tape)
And then just read the bible story for each (hopefully as many as possible out of his new bible he is getting for Christmas from my parents -- luckily we are exchanging presents on Thanksgiving!)
But I'd love to hear which topics you are using for the 25 days -- I assume Jesus himself is supposed to be the 25th day?
I'm so glad you are doing this too, it will be fun to see as we go along (will you post about it?). Thank you for the link to my download! Bear is going to have a great Advent, I love the idea of having a special activity a day!
ReplyDeleteAs you probably know, I am not religious, but we have a lot planned for Christmas time. I plan to write a post about it shortly. I like your idea of a family activity. I'll see if we can act on it :)
ReplyDeleteI linked up our first Christmas activity. :)
ReplyDelete