Advent!

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving celebration here, and I hope to share about that soon. For now I'm thinking about Advent, though. Today is officially the first Sunday of Advent. We'll start with our family observation of Advent tomorrow. This year I have two ideas going. Both are simple, and I don't think it will be too much. Of course, if it is, we can just step back a little.

I want to repeat what we did two years ago. This year Raia and Asya are the ages that Jaan and Raia were then. (Well, Asya is a little younger, of course, just because her birthday is later in the year.) I remember that Jaan really started to understand who Jesus is that year, while Raia just enjoyed the overall idea. It will be fun to see their different responses this year. I'm sure Raia will understand! I wonder what new insight Jaan will gain, and what Asya will pick up?

Also, a while ago I read about an idea in Noel Piper's book, Treasuring God in our Traditions:

(page 116)

I liked the idea, and when I was searching for it this year, I came across another adaptation of it. I wrote to Desiring God ministry, and they kindly sent me their Advent story. I'm adapting that and even adapting the adaptation that I mentioned to get something similar that works for us. I printed out the letter circles and glued little pictures from the Christmas story on the back of each one. (I found almost all that I needed here.) I think I'm going backwards from what I read, because we have all the little circles taped up, picture side out.  Each day we'll flip one. As the pictures disappear, we'll bring out the matching figures in our nativity scene, and by Christmas Day, we'll have our whole scene set up with the entire message of the little circles visible.

For those of you who are as visual as I am, here's what we have so far:

(We need to add some bows or something to make that look less sparse!)