Advent 2014 – Day 1
Books:
Jesus, Me and My Christmas Tree by Crystal Bowman (for Arianna-3)
The Pine Tree Parable by Liz Curtis Higgs (for Elijah-5)
The Legend of the Christmas Tree by Rick Osborne (for Ian)
I’m going to try to give you a glimpse into our Advent celebration this year. I may not manage to blog every day, but I’ll try to cover what we do.
Each day in December leading up to Christmas, one child will open a door on our wooden Advent calendar, and the other two older ones get to unwrap a book for us to read together. Since we didn’t have a door to open today, I passed out 3 books instead, focusing on the theme I chose for the day: Christmas Trees. They were already on our minds because we’d spent yesterday getting all our Christmas decorations out, so it seemed like a good time to talk about the symbolism behind Christmas trees, reviewing what we learned in Buck Denver asks…Why Do They Call It Christmas?, which we watched last night after our decorating was done. I want them to think of Jesus every time they see a Christmas tree, and focusing on it for the whole day right at the beginning of the season seemed like a good way to work toward that goal.
For our evening Bible Time, we lit the first candle on our Advent wreath, started reading Jotham’s Journey by Arnold Ytreeide, and sang the first two verses of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” It was fun seeing Arianna’s sweet face lit up with the wonder of this special moment. The boys remembered our Advent devotions from last year and were excited to be reading by candlelight once again, but it was all new to her. The only thing I would change about this time was that I only read from the book. All three of the kids pointed out the fact that we never got our Bibles out. Jotham’s Journey ends each day’s reading with a devotional based on Scriptures, so I thought that was enough, but I think tomorrow we’ll have everyone get out their Bibles the way we usually do so they can read the verses themselves.
