Advent Season

Here we are the first day of December.  My wife has been listening to Christmas music for three weeks now,  mainly after she found out I had a Christmas Music station on our Pandora account.  We pulled all the decorations down from the barn earlier in the week, and the house is mostly done.  Often this time of the year gets so packed with activities that it becomes somewhat stressful, but for some reason our calendar appears delightfully open.  To start our first day of December off the boys woke up early to make a surprise breakfast, which they had apparently been planning for a couple of days.  We awoke to some clanking of dishes, and whispering coming from the kitchen area.  After awhile we could hear someone cracking eggs, and we finally decided to get up and see what all the commotion was about.  The boys had got up, made their beds, got dressed and then Ethan started making scrambled eggs and Evan set the table.  It was a fun surprise and we had to wake the girls up, otherwise they would have missed breakfast.  The weather looked pretty decent so we decided to go Christmas Tree hunting before the next storm came in.  We found a nice little Christmas tree lot close to my parents house, with very friendly people and good prices.  Much to our surprise we found our tree very quickly.

 

 The Family in front of the tree

This year we are locating the tree in the taller side of the living room, so we went with a tall skinny one.

I started cutting the tree but the boys always want to use saws.  They ended up working together and it went much better than one person.  Meanwhile I stood there and pulled on the tree to keep it from pinching the blade.

The girls hung out and took pictures.

Mia took this picture, and it turned out really well.

Mia loves her Owl hat that Mommy made.

We also ran across some cool looking mushrooms, not too often that you see these.

After visiting with some country friends near the tree farm we headed home to get things done around the house.  We needed to add the pipe to the outside wall for the combustion air on the wood stove.  So the boys took turns helping me with that.  It is best to have a small kid available to get behind the wood stove and cut the hole in the drywall.  That is Evan you see peeking around.

Before it got too stormy we got some of the Christmas lights up on the house today, but had to stick the tree in a bucket of water since we ran out of time in the day.

Advent Activities

Here are some of the things we do during the season to focus on the true meaning of Christmas.  We have an advent calendar, which is a little wood house with doors for each day.  Behind each door is a Bible passage that we read from "The Jesus Storybook Bible", aimed more at our younger children and then an activity, or candy, or craft etc.  Today's was watching "The Nativity Story".  We also have another little fun advent calender type thing that we have done for quite a few years, it is called the Noel Calendar, by Noel Piper.  Unfortunately it appears that it is not available any more, but it looks like this.

Each day of the month you read a little bit more of the Christmas story and slowly put the scene together.  

And of course tomorrow night we will start our advent wreath, where we read some scripture, and sing some songs.

Finally, last year we read for the first time "Jothams Journey" and the kids loved it.  In looking it up we just realized that the author has two more books that tie into Jothams adventures.  We might have to look into getting a different one for next year.