Adventing, Benny-style

Last year I decided it would be fun to just skip “school” for the whole Advent season and just do Advent activities instead. I’d never celebrated Advent before myself, but was very excited to start this new tradition with our family and try and really bring the meaning of Christmas back to Jesus and the gift of His birth (and life and death).

So I put in a few hours at the computer Googling Christmas crafts, baking and activities. I put holds on a bunch of Christmas classics on video from our library’s great hold system (after all, what Christmas is complete without watching the stop animation version of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer a few dozen times?). I ordered a Jesse Tree book and cut out the ornament circles for the season. I also found a whole Bible reading calendar for Advent online.

And then – and this is the key thing here – I used a small three ring binder and some plastic dividers with pockets in them labeled one for each week of Advent and printed out some weekly schedules from Donna Young. Then I just sat down and plugged the stuff into the weekly schedules. I left a column for each activity and filled something in for each day. We had movies planned in, a Christmas song to learn each week, baking days, ornaments to make, gifts to make, outings to go on, and days like St. Nicholas Day marked with an appropriate book ready from the library and the right items set aside to celebrate the day in a fun way.

And all this I had done long before Thanksgiving rolled around.

And do you know what? It was GREAT!!! The boys were thrilled with the crafts and the baking. We had so much fun! I loved having everything all laid out ahead of time so I wasn’t trying to think of something in a pinch. The recipes, craft directions, coloring pages and advent and Jesse tree readings were all right there in my little book, even down the which movie was up for the day and what song we were learning for the week. (By the way, there is nothing cuter than three little boys banging on upside down jars and singing The Little Drummer Boy. I’ll always remember the endless rounds of, “Puh-rum-pum-pum-pum… rum-pum-pum-pum… rum-pum-pum-puuuuhhhmmmm.” It was pretty stinking cute.)

We made our annual salt dough Christmas tree ornaments. We made caramel corn (yum!) and home made gum drops (not so yum...) for the first time. We cut out gingerbread people and decorated them and made a garland of them to hang in our dining room. We made handprint Jesse trees and the boys colored the Jesse Tree ornaments and glued them up their each morning after our Bible reading. We made Fruit Loop garlands to hang on the tree. And the cutest little craft ever was this little wreath shaped frame made from puzzle pieces painted green with little red holly berries dotted on them, and then used as picture frames for my kids and hung on the Christmas tree. So cute! We learned at least three Christmas carols that we had not yet memorized before.

The list goes on and on. I have so many fun memories from last year’s Advent season. Yes, our house was a wreck for most of the month. Sure, I was just barely finished cleaning up one project before the boys were digging into the next one. Yeah, we had so much paper lying around it was undoubtedly a fire hazard. And of course we did not do every single activity I had planned out on my handy-dandy weekly schedules. But we did most of them, and we had a blast doing it all. This year my boys started asking about Advent and when we would start it up again around, oh, late September.

This year things are a little different. This year I have a six month old (almost seven months… Ack!) Girly Pie in tow and I am much less organized. This year Thanksgiving just came later than it seems like it should, so it snuck up on me that Advent was starting YESTERDAY!!! This year, I still have a handy little notebook, but I did steal much of what’s in the new one from what I had planned out last year. But I guess that’s kind of the point. I took the stuff we really enjoyed, I dropped the stuff that was less fun or just not worth doing every single year, and I added in a few new ideas that were better for my kids being a year older (or just easier for a Mommy with one more little one to juggle in the mix) or that just looked like fun.

So we’ll see how it goes this year. Today was Day One of the full crafting schedule. And it was a little hectic, I admit. We made the handprint trees and some popsicle stick angels, and did our Bible readings. But Goose didn’t nap, Punky has been sliding into disrespect lately so we had some teachable moments that interrupted the flow of the day, and Finny is in need of some sensory activated every 2-3 hours so I need to keep on top of our schedule more than I did last year (I’ll write more on the sensory stuff another time…).

And, much to my great dismay, sweet Girly Pie is starting to look like she’s got an ear infection. I know an ear infection does not sound like the end of the world to most people… but to a mom who has watched one baby boy go through years of chronic ear infections and fluid and has fought off ear tubes for four years with her darling Sunshine Boy only to be told by a new Ear, Nose, Throat doc that he needs to have tubes NOW, oh, and a tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy, too… just weeks after his fourth birthday and that he might have suffered some slight permanent hearing loss due to all those years of yuck… well, let me just say that I am not looking forward to going down that road again. It’s a little off topic, I know… but prayers are appreciated for anyone with room left on their prayer list that my Girly Pie does not share the same faulty genetics that her big brother Finny and her Daddy (and her paternal Grandma… the list goes on…) have with a really bad ear history. I just don’t know if I can take walking down that scary, pain-filled road again with another of my babies. But God’s will be done.. not mine.

Ok. Moving on. It might not even be an infection, after all. ;o)

So back to the point. The point is… Advent. It’s fun. It surely has brought us closer together as a family and made for some really great memories for us all. We made more time to study God’s word and really got a lot out of that part of the season… but we also just enjoyed the family tradition side of Christmas, too. And as much as I want my children to know the true meaning of Christmas, I do want them to really have a lot of memories of family time and fun, too. So we may not be the biggest shoppers this time of year, and we may also not be completely focused on Jesus’ birth in every activity that we do, either… but on the whole, it has been a really wonderful thing for our family.

And if you haven’t done something like this before, maybe you can give it a try this year. I don’t have time tonight to hyperlink all the resources I have used, but I’ll gladly pass along links that anyone requests in the comments area.

So Merry Christmas to all… and Happy Adventing, too.