Advent Tree

The season of Advent is upon us, and Rebecca and Elliot are extremely excited for Christmas! They are singing Christmas carols and enjoying Christmas lights and decorations on the houses in town. Normally our family spends the weekend after Thanksgiving buying and decorating our Christmas tree, which we will then enjoy for over a month. This year, however, we will be buying a living Christmas tree so we can plant it in our back yard after Christmas. Living Christmas trees, unlike cut trees, are only supposed to be inside one's home for four to five days, but because we still want to have a tree brighten our living room and keep us in the holiday spirit, we have decided to do an Advent tree until Christmas Eve, when we will bring in and decorate our living tree.

Our Advent tree is a small, artificial tree that we inherited from Jared's grandmother. It is just the right size for our two girls, and it is the perfect precursor to what will replace it in a few weeks' time. Several times each week we read a portion of the story of Christ's birth from the Bible, and then we have the girls decorate an ornament for one of the important characters in that part of the story. The ornaments are simple, just coloring pages of Biblical characters (Gabriel, Mary, Joseph, Herod, etc). After the girls color their ornaments using crayons or markers or colored pencils, even glitter, they are mounted onto a piece of construction paper and placed on the tree. Our goal is to keep the Christmas story at the front of all of our minds as we prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus on Christmas morning. We are using our Advent wreath, and the girls both received Advent calendars from their Godmothers, all of which are other ways to keep Advent holy and count down the days until Christmas, but I wanted to do something that my four and nearly two-year-old can actually interact with and make their own, so this is what we came up with.

Speaking of Christmas, I just finished our fourth knit stocking (above are three of the four), and it's about time too! I started it one year ago, and since I was unable to finish it before Christmas, I put it down and didn't pick it up again until last week. There's something about the holidays that makes me want to be knitting something, so I've decided to knit a tree skirt as my next project. We don't have one still after years of celebrating Christmas together, and it's about time we did. I likely won't finish it before Christmas 2010, but Christmas 2011 should be easy to pull off.