Our Christmas traditions start with Advent. We almost always miss the first Sunday of Advent, however! Mostly this is because of Sinterklaas. There are so many preparations for this, that the beginning of Advent gets forgotten. Not good, I know, and I hope that one year I will be organized enough to incorporate both… but till now, we start Advent after Sinterklaas!As a child I had an advent calendar, and it was a tradition I wanted to carry on with my children. I buy them or make them, depending on where we live. In the Middle East there was no Christmas celebration in public, so we made our own. We hung 25 little paper bags on a garland and I put chocolates in each bag. Back home in Australianow the children have chocolate ones from the shop. Daniel has a Spiderman one this year, Elizabeth a Barbie one, and Matthew a Cars one. I know, nothing to do with Jesus… we just use them as a countdown till Christmas.

This year we also have a really special Advent calendar sent to us from friends in the U.S. - a Lego one! The kids are having so much fun having something little to make from Lego every day! They are quite spoiled by our dear friends!

We have Advent candles as well, that we light each Sunday (except for the first one as already confessed!). We do a little Bible reading with each candle that we light, and last year with school we went into the meanings of each candle a bit deeper. We use white, red or gold ones - whichever we happen to have on hand. This year I need to buy new ones since I had to leave the candles I had behind when we moved back to Australia. I think I will go for gold…

Last year we made an advent wreath. The children just had so much fun doing this. As I already mentioned, there was no Christmas to be seen in public in the Middle East. In one way this was good, since we weren’t bombarded with Christmas sales and junk mail. On the other hand, it was easy to forget Christmas was coming up since there was no sign of it anywhere - no Christmas decorations, no music playing in the malls, etc. We had to make do with the decorations we had brought with us, or some we managed to buy off other expats who were leaving. Sometimes we found some Christmas things in the strangest places - little shops where you would least expect them. When we saw these things we would buy as many as we could and share it around with all our friends!

Mostly, though, we made things ourselves. From this:

To this:

And finally this:

The white candles were for each Sunday, and then the red one was the Christ candle.

Celebrating Advent is really a lovely way to prepare our hearts for the birth of Jesus. It gives focus to what can often be a hectic and stressful time of the year. There are lots of links for advent stuff on the internet. Here are just a few that I have found:

http://www.teachingmom.com/features/advent.html

http://www.cptryon.org/prayer/child/adv.html

http://www.crivoice.org/cyadvent.html

http://www.spirithome.com/advent.html

How dark outside!
but see — a star’s in the sky;
Mary and Joseph are passing by.
So let’s light a candle to welcome them
as they go on their way to Bethlehem.

We’ll light a candle in church each day,
We’ll light one candle each week and pray.

We’ll light a candle at home each day,
We’ll light a candle each week and pray.

(from here )

This is my second post for the Holiday Open House. See my first post here.

My next one is here!

For more Holiday Open House posts, visit Tiany!