celebrating advent

I've been thinking a lot about the traditions and memories I want to incorporate into our family's holiday season.  For us, a lot of those traditions have developed over the Advent season.

Every day, as soon as Kiddo gets up, he rips a link off of his paper chain to count down the days until Christmas morning.

After his paper chain, he heads out to the living room where he adds the next piece to our advent calendar.

The last of the shepherds went up today.  He's getting excited - he's only got the three kings, Joseph, Mary and Jesus left!

And then, after the Advent calendar, Kiddo heads to our Jesse Tree.  This has been my favorite part of Advent this year.

While I enjoy some of the "fluff" that comes with Christmas - the music, the decorations, the lights, etc., Hubby and I wanted our family to be able to enjoy those things while still focusing on the things that really matter - family, friends, and the Christ whose birthday we celebrate.  To focus on family and friends, we have done a few things to make our Christmas simpler and less stressful.  And to focus on Jesus and his birth, we've introduced the Jesse Tree.

I knew nothing about the Jesse Tree tradition a few years ago.  Once I heard about it, I got excited about making it a part of our Christmas every year.  For those (like me) not familiar with the Jesse Tree, the name comes from Isaiah 11, where Isaiah prophesies the coming of the Messiah and describes him as "a shoot coming up from the stump of Jesse."  An ornament is added to the tree each day of Advent, and each ornament has a symbol representing one part of the story of Christ's coming - from Creation to Christmas.  Many of them also refer to the individuals in Jesus' lineage.  I love that it is teaching my son to see the big picture - to see that, from the creation of the world to Christ's birth and beyond, God has been working in the world and loving his people.

I found a silhouette of a bare tree on the web and used it to paint our tree on a large piece of butcher paper.  I cut it out and stuck it to our dining room wall with scotch tape.  I couldn't find a set of pre-made ornaments to buy, so I am making our ornaments (out of paper, mostly).  I am spending way too much time on them (Hello, my name is Kirsten, and I am a perfectionist), but I am having a lot of fun with them. 

 (Noah)

 

(Ruth - this is the one that I thought the cat had eaten.  I think it has been the most time-consuming one.)

 (Jesse and David)

Kiddo has had a great time with it - he has been studying a lot of the same stories at school, and it is fun to see him connect the dots and really absorb the stories and how they fit together.  

I'm still working on the ornaments.  Kiddo comes out each morning eager to see if I finished making the ornament for that day (tomorrow he's going to be disappointed - I've been blogging and writing Christmas cards and putting together some gifts instead of making an ornament.  Hopefully there will be time after church...). 

I feel like it has taken us a few years to figure out what traditions work for our family and are important to us - but maybe that is the nature of things.  And I'm sure they will get tweaked as the years go by and Kiddo gets older.

So now it's your turn - what are some of your family's Advent traditions?


P.S.  Details on the ornaments:

I've found a couple of websites with printable ornaments that I have used as templates for most of the ornaments.  A few others are simply stickers, and some I have had to draw myself.  Each website seems to have a different set of ornaments and symbols, so I have cobbled them together and picked out the ones I thought were most important.  Here are some of the sites I've used:

https://www.rca.org/sslpage.aspx?pid=1625

http://www.eriercd.org/jessetree.htm

http://www.crivoice.org/jesse.html