It's Advent Time!!

Ah, Advent.  My favorite time of year.  I love all the little traditions we have started for our family to anticipate the coming of Christ.  While the shopping and baking and spending time with family and friends and visiting Santa at the mall and anticipating his arrival at our house is fun and definitely a big part of Christmas, none of these is the reason we celebrate it.  In order to avoid being swept up in all those activities and losing the true meaning of Christmas, our family has instituted ways to daily remember the precious gift God has given us.

Each morning, we pull a good deeds slip from our Advent Tree calendar.  I used to put little candies in each door, but my kids don't need more candy.  Then we would put little toys in each door, but the toys were junky and ended up getting lost or broken or thrown away.  What a waste of money.  This year, however, we are putting good deeds written on slips of paper in each door and the boys will get to learn what it means to give at Christmas time. 

Each evening, we do our felt Advent tree.  Each "ornament" has a nativity character inside, and the boys love to take out the characters and put them in the stable scene.  We read a short bit of scripture to go with each character and tell a little bit of the Christmas story as well.

Every Sunday night we light the advent wreath and have a little service where we read part of the Christmas story and some scripture.  The boys add parts of the Little People nativity each week until Christmas Eve, when we add baby Jesus.  Then we sing carols and eat cookies and egg nog. 

So.

My goal is to blog every day about our Advent activities. This is for two reasons:
1. If I tell you I'm doing this, I'm held a little more accountable to actually doing it and to keeping Christ as the center of our Advent season.
2. Maybe you need some good ideas, too.  I can tell you that all my ideas have come from other blogs/Pinterest/Facebook.  I don't come up with this stuff on my own.  So, I am simply passing down ideas that I have gotten from other people.  Feel free to use any of it that you want.

Here we go!