Advent musings and christmas preparations
Advent is one of my favourite seasons. It’s a time of quiet preparation of the heart…not quite as sombre and austere as the (fruitful) time of Lent but a season also heavily coloured by a great sense of hope and looking forward to the coming of Jesus. Traditionally, this time was used to ponder the Four Last Things: Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. On a surface level, these sound extremely sombre indeed. But, as with everything along the Memento Mori theme, once you scratch the surface you will find hope and joy.
As we’re coming to the end of the calendar year, I also can’t help but look back at the last year. So many things have happened in such a short amount of time and I feel like we’re only just catching up with this fact now! In response to this, I had planned a peaceful Advent with a few meaningful traditions and personal penances thrown in. However, even the best laid plans can go awry and I am reminded of the fact that this season of early motherhood requires me to yield my stubborn perfectionism to the chopping and changing of routines and plans. It’s good for me and is a lesson in itself! Anyway, I thought I’d just note down a few things we’re doing inside our household in the run-up to Christmas.
family advent traditions
One of the benefits of designing two Jesse Trees in a year is that we have no shortage of Jesse Tree options to go with for Advent! We are using the kit available to download in the shop here. The beauty of this kit is that it’s very easily tailored to different age groups. With our toddler, we just look at the pictures on each ornament and then tell him a very simplified version of the accompanying bible story. Older children will be able to read the bible passages themselves and start to have meaningful conversations about the events and characters involved and how they point to Christ.
We’ve also picked up the beautiful Advent devotional written by the Milne family. It’s a concise and well-written devotional suitable for families, with a heavy emphasis on Scripture. A key part of the devotional is the candle lighting ritual and prayer sandwiching the reading for that day. It’s designed to be used with an Advent wreath but you could adapt it for use with a single candle, too.
That leads us to the Advent wreath. We ended up going for the traditional four red candles this year instead of three purple and one rose. I’d love to say that the reason for this was a cultural one but, alas, it was more due to the lack of availability of violet candles! Red candles are the traditional choice in Germany (where the Advent tradition originated) and also feature in the Vatican’s Advent wreath. The customs surrounding different candles colours for Advent wreaths is pretty interesting, actually. The common purple and rose combination started in the USA (from what I’ve read) and is great because it matches the liturgical colours used in this season. The purple candles are replaced by dark blue candles in some faith traditions, such as within the Sarum Use. The dark blue symbolises the colour of the night sky during the Holy Family’s journey to Bethlehem.
We did a very low key celebration for St Nicholas’ Day, involving just a little tangerine in a little person’s shoes. We will also be celebrating St Lucy’s Day on the 13th December with candles and fresh pastries.
prayer & perfectionism
On a personal level, I decided not to try and pick up too many extra spiritual disciplines. I’m aiming to pray morning and evening prayer (even if all at once…toddlers!) and am concentrating on making more effort to offer up inconveniences for others. I have a tendency to try and make things into achievements/perfectionist projects, which can actually cloud my spiritual life and relationship with God, so I’m deliberately being quite flexible with this! It’s SO easy to see everything that other people are reporting/doing during Advent and use this to compare your own life to, which is not useful at all.
The shop closed for the year yesterday and I’m busy organising postage of the last of the orders. We hope that you all have a wonderful Advent and Christmas!
