I'm here to talk to you today about Advent. Of course, as a proper nerd, I could not write a post about Advent before properly researching my topic and by that I mean reading a couple of Wikipedia entries. I love Wikipedia. *sigh* Anyhow, in reading these articles, I found that religious advent starts anywhere between Nov 27 and Dec 3 (4 sundays before Christmas) and is the liturgical start of the year for most western Christmas churches.
Since we're not big church-goers, we put meaning in our advent the same way we put meaning in the Christmas season. Christmas to us is all about family and service. Since my kids are so little. I wanted neither an advent that was wholly about candy or filled with so many activities that my kids would be exhausted …. so we came up with a nice mixture. We'll do activities about half to 2/3 of the time and on the other days, the kids will just get a hershey kiss each.
The planned advent activities so far are:
• make more paper snowflakes (one window is bare)
• go for a walk in our 'hood to check out the Christmas lights
• go shopping as a family
• watch a Christmas movie (will probably do this one twice)
• pick out a Christmas tree with Grammy and Papa
• wrap gifts
• shop for our Angel Tree kids
• go out for Fish & Chips
• make a dutch apple pancake
• write/decorate letters to Santa
• decorate cookies
• Feliz Navidad festival – i.e. we pick up tamales from our favorite tamale vendor and make guacamole and have margaritas (Christmas Eve)
• discuss family donations
• decoupage candle holders
How about you … do you plan to celebrate Advent?
Definetly the lights, we put up the tree, did Christmas shopping and made pancakes. Love Dutch Apple Pancakes. We still have to watch a movie and do more cooking together.