uninterrupted coffee is sublime: How we live Advent and PREPARE for the birth of the King of Kings!!!

This post was built over many many years of trying different things and tweaking them to fit our family. There are lots of things here we never could have done with just littles. But since it has been an organic growth, the older kids can now help with a lot of it and the little kids, while they don't understand a lot of things, they are excited by everyone else's excitement and love the whole experience, and eventually they will come to understand what it all means.

Advent used to be a time where I was stressed; trying to do too much....trying to do it all....wanting to make Advent "perfect" for teaching my children about the birth of Christ. Thank goodness, over time God whacked me on the head and showed me that Advent is really about quieting our hearts and minds (be more like the Blessed Mother maybe, who "pondered all these things in her heart") and preparing! It has since become my most favorite season of the liturgical year. I really feel like our traditions and their slow progression helps us to quiet ourselves and really focus on preparing so that come Christmas we can bust out the CELEBRATING!!!!

Without further adieu, here is the "breakdown" of how we live the season of Advent in our house:

Week 1:

~Put out all Nativities (manger and animals only)
~ Put out and light 1st candle of advent wreath
~Hang advent calendar if we are using one this year
~Place Mary and Joseph out upstairs to start their journey to Bethlehem (we move them closer to the Nativity each Sunday of Advent)
~Every person chooses a sacrifice or "gift" they want to work on throughout Advent (this is their gift for baby Jesus). We write them down and place them in a box and wrap it. We often read the book, "The Littlest Angel" in the evening before we do this activity to help us get our minds and hearts in the right place for really giving Jesus a gift that is from our heart. *(see note below)

Week 2:

~Prepare our insides (hearts and homes)....start decorating inside the house (indoor garland, stockings, etc).
~Continue lighting advent wreath...this week light 2 candles
~Move Mary and Joseph closer to the Nativity
~Since this is our lightest week, I usually address and mail my Christmas cards this week

Week 3:

~Gaudete Sunday (which also means hope or rejoice) we put up and light our outside lights and put up and light our tree (no ornaments yet)
~Also light advent wreath...3 candles this week
~This week begins the O Antiphons leading up to the birth of Christ.

*We read one antiphon each day at dinner after we light our advent wreath and sing the verse of O Come O Come Emmanuel.

*We hang an O Antiphon ornament (which we made several years ago) on the tree each night for the corresponding Antiphon. We also hang a bigger O Antiphon card above our sliding glass door in our kitchen (doing it this way with the visual really helps to build the anticipation for the coming of the Christ child).

~Move Mary and Joseph even closer to the manger

Week 4:

~Final preparations (this may be some baking and food prep)
~Continue O Antiphons
~Light 4th candle in Advent wreath
~Move Mary and Joseph to somewhere in sight of the manger
~Decorate tree on Christmas Eve while listening to Handel's Messiah

*Note: We also keep the practice of "making the most warm and cozy bed of hay possible" for the Baby Jesus. We have a bag of straw that we keep behind our manger (which is displayed in our kitchen) and throughout advent when our kids are caught being good or kind or making sacrifices, they can add straw to the manger, so that by Christmas Eve the manger is over flowing. On Christmas Eve morning we place Mary and Joseph in the stable. Then, after Midnight Mass we place baby Jesus in on the warm bed of straw we built throughout Advent and present him with our present that we prepared in week 1. We kneel before the Manger and pray that our gift is made worthy for the King of Kings who is the greatest of all gifts (the hubs leads this prayer).

We have built these traditions over the years and they are so near and dear to my heart. I love the slow preparation which builds anticipation and mimics the preparation you do when welcoming a new baby. It takes time. Doing it this way also helps us not to get overwhelmed because it doesn't all have to be done at once, and we really enjoy the season of Advent. We are then prepared to really celebrate come Christmas. I will share what we do for celebrating the 12 days of Christmas in another post.

Below are pictures I dug up from past years to help give a little visual. I wish I had better ones. I will work on getting better pictures to illustrate these traditions as we live them this Advent and add them to the post for next year. It is my hope that by recording these traditions they will inspire others, but mostly that they will be all together in a safe place for me to be able to draw upon them every year, and eventually pass them down to my children as they grow up and go out into the world and build their own families and traditions.