Jeff:
Today. We’re going to talk about Advent and we’re going to give you quick kind of bullet pointed Advent tradition. So for us, this is going to be five Advent traditions that you can do to level up your family. Jeremy, what are the first couple?
Jeremy:
Yeah, guys. So this is such an awesome opportunity to bring meaning into the family. One that we’ve really enjoyed as a family for a lot of years is a little book. You can go on Amazon and find it, it’s called Jotham’s Journey. And it’s a really cool Advent book where you read a chapter a night. What I really like about this book is it immerses your children in first century Jewish family. And so you see all kinds of different traditions that the family had, all kinds of different communities. This kid basically is searching for his family ends up of course, in Bethlehem, on Christmas night or the night that Jesus was born. But it’s a great little journey that you can go on with your family. So we’ve done that a lot of years. There’s actually a few books in that series that we have.
We only did the first one, which was Jotham’s Journey. So it’s J-O-T-H-A-M journey. Another one that… We were having a great conversation at homeroom and one that a lot of homeroomies are our friends who are in our homeroom. Our membership site are doing is they wrap 24 books, like picture books for their kids, put it under the tree and they pick one out every single night leading up to Christmas. And so this allows them to not just have like that one shot when you’re talking about the meaning of Christmas, maybe on Christmas Eve, but it’s like happening 24 times. And there are so many books about Christmas that this can actually be done.
A lot of people are going to secondhand stores or even going to the library and checking out the books, wrapping them, putting them under the tree, lots of creative ways to save money and still do this. But I love that one. The other one that really stood out to me, we haven’t done this one, but I love this idea. There is a number of people who would take 24 stories from the Jesus storybook Bible. And so they just immerse their kids in Jesus for all the different times, leading up through Advent to Christmas day. So those are three ideas. If you guys don’t have any right now that you can try, Jeff, what do you guys trying?
Jeff:
Yeah. So there’s a couple that we really like. The first one is Ann Voskamp’s resources. If people are familiar. The reason I like that is I feel like she’s, it’s great for, she has basically a normal Advent devotional for adults. So me and Alyssa used that one for reading it morning in December, but then she also has this cool, pop up book that looks like a children’s book when you open it, it opens up to a big tree. And then there’s 25 little ornaments in there that each have like a tiny little couple sentence devotional or truth that then you kind of talk about and averse and then you hang it up on the tree. So that’s a really cool thing. The kids love it. It’s really tactile. It’s really functional and they love it. So that one, another one that we really like doing, we haven’t done every single year, but we’ve done a lot. Is Alyssa will write up.
She’ll make homemade ornaments with names of God and all the different names he has in the scripture. And then each night we’ll talk about that and then hang it up on there. And so I think that’s a really cool one and then ending then with the ones on what we see in Isaiah and then the Advent and the gospels of Counselor and Emmanuelle and him coming. And so it’s fun to end on that version of the story. So yeah, that’s what I would say. And wherever you’re at think take advantage of this time. Advent is a really good time to be intentional for your family team to point them towards Jesus.
