Today we officially started our Advent festivities!  This is a new tradition for us in that we just started it last year.  I was part of a Stamp Club through Stamping Up, and came across this Advent Calendar kit so I decided it might be a neat thing to try.

In my childhood, we often had an Advent calender with little doors that we opened up.  I remember loving it!  I couldn’t even tell you what the things said, but I remember being excited each day to open it.  It was with that sweet memory that I decided to venture down the road of Advent in my own home.

Advent is defined as “a coming; appropriately the coming of our Savior, and in the calendar, it includes four sabbaths before Christmas, beginning on St. Andrew’s Day, or on the sabbath next before or after it.”  Noah Webster, American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828.  So technically, Advent started on Sunday, November 27th.  For us, it is easier to start from December 1st and end on Christmas.  The more important definition is that it is “a season of devotion”…a time for reflection on what this season means.  To me, Advent allows us to slow down and process over 25 days the love of Christmas with love for each other.

Starting this last year, I put together the Stamping Up Advent calendar and strung it in our dining room window.  I also found this cool Lego Advent calendar that I thought Josh might like.  At first, he wasn’t quite sure what to expect.  He had never experienced Advent before in the sense of a daily reminder with a little gift.  Boy, how he ended up loving it!  He opened one in the morning and then the other in the evening when Mark got home.  Oftentimes, he would have to search for the gift as those boxes are really too small to hold much.  Most mornings, it would be the very first thing he would do.

What I didn’t realize was how perfect the timing was.  Josh was 10 years old, and as we all know, there is a time in life when kids start to wonder about things.  Sometimes they come up with the questions themselves, or other times, somebody helps them along.  2010 was that year for us, and those thoughts were troubling to him.  But somehow, celebrating the Advent really spoke to him.  He embraced it with renewed and refreshed excitement while processing all that he was learning.

This year, he is so excited!  Very excited.  He couldn’t wait for Advent today.  He even asked me about it over the weekend.  I think he was reminding me of how important it is to him.  So you might ask, what are in the boxes?  Normally, a little note plus a little gift.  Sometimes it is candy.  Sometimes it is tiny toy, balloon, or ball of some sort…that’s what he was looking for this morning hidden in our dining room Christmas trees.  Last year, we put Pokemon cards, tiny packages of Legos, or stickers, and mixed in with the fun were gentle reminders that faith is important, others need to be loved, and that Jesus is the reason we make this time special for each other!