Advent

Advent  - a season, beginning four Sundays before Christmas, of expectant waiting and preparation for the celebration of the Nativity of Jesus at Christmas.  The term is an anglicized version of the Latin word adventus, meaning "coming" or "arrival". 

I love the season, and we're definitely all in anticipation of the coming Christ's birthday in our house!

This year we took a different spin on our advent calendar. I decided since the kids were in anticipation of some type of calendar to count down the days until Christmas, maybe I should craft something up. I don't care too much for the store bought hidden chocolate candy-type calendars. After all who needs chocolate for breakfast each morning this time of year? I didn't want itty bitty trinket toys that would get thrown out. Besides if it's just one toy, my kids would fight over who gets it each day. I needed to invent something that would work, and yet be practical. Something simple & quick that also incorporates our traditions we already do this time of year. This called for some thinking ;) I didn't want to make a ton of work for myself.  Hmmm what could we do that would get us in this spirit of Christmas, while being mostly green, and have some easy and relatively free family fun? Some of our most remembered times are those where we were just doing and being together as a family. 

So, I got to work. I peeked around on the web, and dibbled and dabbled in a bit of this and that picking how I wanted to my calendar to look.  And I came up with this:

Red & White bakers twine hung with miniature clothes pins attaching little numbered pieces of paper

Something easy enough they could each take turns retrieving

That was the easy part. The design. The hard part was coming up with 24 actual things to write down. So not all of them were exactly creative or biblical. Some just plain simple. Some more outlandish than others {for the weekends}, and some just very quick and easy for busy scheduled nights. For everyone wondering what I came up with (ha!) I will post the ones we've done so far...

Day #1 Dad was at the Zags Game...& conveniently we opened up...Dinner Out.

Day #2 We hung the Christmas Lights

Day #3 We got to stay up an extra 10 min. after bed time

Day #4 Kisses Today. They got both kisses from mom & dad with I love you's and some candy cane Hershey kisses too!

Day #5 They got to open up one present early.

 

Day #6 We took our family Christmas pictures! (which meant more candy and bribery)

 Here's a sneak peek!

Day #7 New toothbrush day! After all that candy.

Day #8 We hung the wreath on our front door. (I told you some were just festive fun!)

Day #9 Tree of sharing shopping day

Day #10 Festival of Trees 2012 at the Davenport

Day #11 Making gingerbread houses.  All asymmetrically aligned ...this one is Jalen's

And this one most definitely would be Jordan's ;)

As patriotic as you can make gingerbread houses...that would be Andrew's!

Even Asher was pretty proud of his gingerbread house.

Day #12 We all read verses on love, and gave hugs (both real and chocolate Hershey hugs)

Day #13 Unwrap the new 2012 ornament

Day #14 Take a Drive and look at the Christmas Light Displays

Day #15 Listen to Liam Neeson's Storybook version of the Polar Express

Day #16 Played our Favorite (New) Board Game.

And last but not least we finished off last night's advent with...

Day #17 Dinner by candlelight 

So far, it's been really fun. The kids are all excited to open up the new one each morning. It was something we had strategized with our schedules before we hung it up. You guessed it...we're both type A! And it doesn't take the place of our family devotion time where we read a bit more about Jesus' birth and the days preceding and after. But it does just help grow their excitement in anticipation in celebrating the birth of our Savior and King. I will finish sharing the last week of Advent {ideas} with you after we complete them. Already I can't wait to tweak our list of things to do for next year, but I'm sure the kids will look forward to doing this for several more years. 

P.S. Stay tuned as I hope to post some pics and hopefully video of the boys' Christmas performance!