Today we celebrate the feast of Christ the King, which means that Advent is one week away. Advent is one of my favorite seasons, and it’s where we began when we first started to try to live more liturgically.
It’s a great season to begin because it’s the beginning of the new Church year. It’s a time of preparation, and it’s easy to tweak traditions and celebrations to make them more intentionally in keeping with the season. We are by no means experts at what it means to live liturgically (if you want an expert, I highly recommend this book), but I thought I’d share a few things we’ve found to be doable.
First of all, we are a household that decorates for Christmas right away. I love Christmas decorations and the festive nature they bring to our home. For us, decorating has served to add to the anticipation our kids have for Christmas. Time is still a very abstract concept for them, so making the seasonal change concrete seems to help orient their minds and hearts. We still keep the focus on the birth of Christ, but we also definitely rock out to Jingle Bells.
The Montessorian in me also loves tweaking our environment to make it more beautiful, and in doing so I’ve found I’m able to highlight areas of our house that get overlooked because we look at them day in and day out. This works for me and the kids. For example, we move our painting of the Blessed Virgin from above the mantle to make room for our nativity set on the mantle. She is spending Advent hanging in our dining room, and I am appreciating her and being drawn to prayer in new ways as I see the painting from new angles. For the kids, I switch out the baskets their toys are in to decorative Christmas boxes. Suddenly they feel like they’re opening a present and the toys that sat unused on the shelf are rediscovered with glee.
I also add a Nativity Set to their toys for the season. A few years back I found a very sweet wooden one at my favorite thrift store, and the kids love, love, love playing with it each year.
Central to our Advent traditions is, of course, our Advent Wreath. We added a book of household prayers to our library years ago, and it is full of prayers for all seasons and moments of life. We don’t use it nearly enough, but one time we are consistent with it is during Advent. We take a few moments at the beginning of dinner to light the candles, say the prayers for the week, and then sing a verse of O Come O Come Emmanuel. It’s not a long process, and holds our children’s attention (it might be the fire that does it for William . . .). This year Gianna and I rolled beeswax candles for our wreath, which was a simple and fun activity. We used this set.
Two years ago we found a sweet little cloth and velcro Advent calendar, but once Gianna and William were older and ready for a little more, we added this gem from Ann Voskamp. Gianna loves the stories, and is old enough to appreciate how delicate the tree is, so she is very careful with the book and ornaments. We tuck the meditations right into our bedtime story routine, which makes for another touch point with the liturgical season. and now we have a calendar for each child.
This year we are planning on adding straw to Jesus’ manger throughout Advent. I’ll set up a jar of pieces of yarn and a simple little basket, and each time Mark or I notice a virtue or an act of kindness on the part of the children, they will be invited to add a piece to make Jesus’ bed more cozy. We haven’t tried it yet, but I’m hoping that the activity will inspire more grace and courtesy- Gianna in particular is very motivated by serving and loving the Lord, so hopefully this will help her to experience in a concrete way that what we do for others we do for Jesus.
What does your family do? What are your favorite traditions? What have you tried and hated? What are you dying to try? Let me know!