Update: Below you’ll find the original blog post I wrote about our [then] new Advent tradition. We loved having an intentional way to celebrate Advent and spend December focused on our family. I’ll continue to update the ideas and links to activities each year as our list grows and evolves. I hope this find you preparing your hearts and home for a beautiful Advent season!
Our family hasn’t explicitly celebrated Advent in the past. Since moving to Seattle, we’ve done Magic in the Market the Saturday after Thanksgiving and while we’re gone our sneaky elf, Haha, brings us a gift. Usually we get our Christmas jammies, a board game we can play together, and some treats that we don’t usually have around the house. Haha the elf has been extremely lazy the past few years; maybe us moving half way across the country did him in. Also, disclaimer: I wish I never would have started the elf but I was young and didn’t think it through. We’ve de-emphasized it a lot but he still shows up to bring us a gift at the beginning of the season. Regardless, I was looking for something to make Advent a little more special, with a lot more emphasis on the preparing our hearts for celebrating Jesus’ first coming. Last year we bought the kids Lego Advent calendars and while they enjoyed them, it felt a bit lackluster. So, I came up with something new and something that will hopefully become a tradition that our boys look forward to with excitement and joy. It’s something that’s way more inline with our family values (stay tuned for more on that another month) and is an attempt to be much more intentional about our December.
The main ideas:
- We have 24 envelopes, each with a card inside.
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Each card [mostly] falls into one of three categories:
- An act of service to others
- Spending time together as a family
- Going on an Advent adventure
- Each card also contains a title of a story to read as a family from The Jesus Storybook Bible We love, love, LOVE this Bible. It is written perfectly to read aloud.
- Each day, starting December 1st, we will open the card in the morning and complete the activity at some point during that day or evening.
- Each evening we will take turns reading from our story for the night.
Friends, I am so stinkin’ excited about this! Jesus, family, and service? This is my perfect December. Here’s how I planned the 24 days leading up to Christmas.
- I brainstormed 30-ish activities for our family. I Bing’ed Seattle area holiday events and we decided which ones fit our time frames and budget. Whatever we didn’t manage to fit in this year can be looked at for next year.
- I printed a December calendar so I could write out everything that was already on our calendar for the month. This was important because we have some church activities and evening sports that would mean we’d need some less time-consuming activities those days. When I’m planning for this many days, I like to see them all in front of me in print. Call me old fashioned; do what works best for you!
- I started adding activities that I knew were date specific and then filled in the blank days with activities that would fit our schedule for that day.
- I grabbed some small envelopes and red clothespins at Michaels and planned on using some twine I already had to hang the cards.
- I made the envelopes in Word and printed them.
- I typed up cards to go inside of each envelope and added The Jesus Storybook Bible story on the bottom of each one. I used this plan.
- I stuffed each envelope with it’s corresponding card and hung with twine and clothespins from the mantle. Notice I did not say “seal the envelope”. My plan is to reuse the envelopes each year (#teacher) and once they are clipped with the clothespins, I’m hoping they’ll not be tempting to peek into.
Need some ideas? Here’s some of what we have on our calendar for the month! Some of these are Seattle-specific but checking out fun holiday events in your area is just an internet search away.
Acts of Service
- Host a donation drive; deliver flyers to neighbors to let them know where and what to drop-off
- Donate items to a charity of your choice
- Deliver donations from drive
- Give cookies to service people in your community
- Make blessing bags to keep in car for when we see someone in need (we have socks, hand warmers, toothpaste + toothbrush, snacks, small water bottle, chapstick, etc. that will go in ours)
- Make cards and gifts for teachers. Each kiddo is to specifically write what they enjoy/appreciate about the teacher or what makes them feel safe/courageous/cared-about in the class
- Giving “reindeer food” to our neighbor friends (that we know for sure have a Santa tradition)
- Each boy will take three one-dollar bills with a note attached and either give to kiddos at our local dollar store OR hide them in the toy section there. The note will just say something about spending it on something special and to let the shopper know it was purposefully put there, and not lost
- Making a special Christmas package for the child we sponsor through World Vision
- Go on a hike and “leave it better than you found it” and pick up trash on the way. Bring gloves!
- Deliver cookies to our neighbors
Family Time
- Family game night
- Polar Express with homemade hot cocoa (and a bunch of fun fixings from Target) and popcorn (oh, hey Boom Chicka Pop, we love you) in our Christmas jammies
- Gingerbread house building and decorating (also from Target)
- Kid’s choice supper
- Make bath bombs
- Make tortilla snowflakes
- Bake and decorate Christmas cookies
- Ice cream at Bartells after supper
- Jammies + hot cocoa in the car while we drive around checking out holiday lights
- Make reindeer food
- Christmas Eve service + Chinese afterwards
- Paint a canvas for your room
Advent Adventures
- Snowflake Lane Parade
- Garden d’Lights at the Bellevue Botanical Gardens
- Gingerbread Village
- Enchant
- Winterfest at Seattle Center + Pike Place Market
- Winter hike in the mountains (likely Franklin Falls or Gold Creek Pond)
Activities That Didn’t Make the Cut….this year
- Run a supply drive for Tent City 4
- Go caroling
- Santa Arrgh-rival, A Pirate X-Mas at Country Village Shops in Bothell
- Ride a Christmas Ship
- See a holiday play + donate tickets to another family
- Leavenworth Holiday Lighting Festival
After we decided on our list, I started ordering or picking up the few things that we needed throughout the month. As I got items, I put them in a plastic bag with the number of the day that we were doing that activity. I put the plastic bags into a brown paper bag ( I know, redundant) and listed all the days on the outside of the bag. They are stored at the top of our closet until we need them. We hung the envelopes across the mantle and the plan is to gather the supplies for each day the night before, and put them in a container that will stay by the fireplace. This way, everything we need for our activity is right where we can easily access it and we aren’t wasting precious time on weeknights running around hunting for supplies. I also made a card labeled 00 that will be an introduction to our new tradition and will come with our holiday jammies the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
I hope you’ll join me in being intentional with your time this December! It doesn’t have to be anything big or grand, maybe just getting a couple things that are usually on the December to-do list done in November. My goal the past few years has been to have all the shopping, wrapping, shipping, planning, decorating and Christmas cards mailed by December. I can’t tell you how amazing it feels to just soak in and love on my family during a month that is usually crazy-busy. Does it make November a bit more chaotic than normal? A little bit, but it feels so amazing not to be trying to do it all in December with so many other people also running around like crazy.
What are some of your holiday traditions? Will you be trying anything new this year?
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