Christmas Traditions 2012

We really enjoyed our Advent activity last year with the Names of Jesus ornaments, coloring pages and paper chain.  It was fun when we put up the tree pulling out the ornaments from last year with the boys and talk about them again. 

This year we are doing a three fold focus and celebration for Advent. First is the Daily Christmas Books/ Activities we began the day after Thanksgiving. The second is the Jesse Tree Advent that began December 1st  and last we'll start What God Wants for Christmas on December 18th for the week leading up to Christmas.

Our books are all toddler/ preschool faith focused. They are  fun and familiar characters like Veggie Tales, BOZ,  Charlie Brown and the Polar Bears from the God Gave us series. Some of our favorite Christian holiday authors are in there such as Crystal Bowman, Patricia Pingry, Liz Curtis Higgs and Michelle Medlock Adams. I really enjoy that several of them take all the glitter and tinsel and point the star, the angel, the tree, the lights and the gifts all back to Jesus.

 I didn't want 30 something renditions of Luke 2, but I did want the truth in every book. I haven't come across one yet that Munchkin doesn't ask me to repeat later in the day. Definite favorites- reading 6+ times in a day- so far as been J is for Jesus and Christmas with Boz. I bought enough books to start the day after Thanksgiving and go through New Year's Eve. These were taken Sunday. We completed day 13 today. 

The books after the ones with the stars are not in the order they will necessarily be read. I make the decision the night before based on what we've been talking about or  activities we might be doing then. For example, we started with the "Pine Tree Parable" and "Jesus, Me and My Christmas Tree" first since we were putting up our Christmas tree. The image and sound of  Munchkin screaming through the upstairs staircase for the first time, "We have our own tree!" was priceless! Daddy and I put it up while the boys were sleeping.  Day 11 was "J is for Jesus" since that was the beginning of our Letter of the Week with our homeschool curriculum focus for J. Mommy gave them a candy cane with their breakfast to tie in with the book. It was a big sticky mess, but man they had fun :-)

It was a year long labor of love carefully selecting books and I'm happy with our collection.

The Jesse Tree Advent. We decided to share this activity with several friends who wanted to participate. Each lady took one ( or more) ornaments and made them and we all swapped. 20 of us now going through this Advent together with this beautiful array of ornaments walking from Creation and ending in the Birth of Christ. We definitively scored on this one as we knew everyone and now this wonderful tradition is interwoven with the incredible relationships and each persons individual and unique take on how to represent that bible story of prophesy. We are using a combination of devotions and our children's bibles to talk about each story and prophesy.

What God Wants for Christmas is a 7 day Nativity Advent from Family Life with a CD and a devotion written by Barbara Rainey.  I snapped this up on Cyber Monday half off and am looking forward to the focus on the Scene.