Advent Warm Up
By Rachel Jankovic
One of my life slogans is when you are behind on life, get ahead on
Christmas. It should come as no surprise to you that I am quite good at
getting ahead on Christmas, having had lots of opportunities to practice
what I preach in this regard.
Christmas Warm Up!
We have been celebrating Advent consistently for almost twenty years
now - through various houses, and numbers of children, and ages of
children, and mental and physical energy levels. We have tried things that
we never went back to, loved things that became instant can’t-do-without
traditions, and I like to think we have gotten a little better at it every year.
The important thing about how we celebrate Advent is just that - we
celebrate it. It is a season of anticipation, of delight, of joy in incarnational
living. I hope that this collection of ideas and suggestions will help you to
make your home a place of overflowing love and joy through the holiday
season. We do not do all of these things every year - having a great many
more ideas than days of Advent means that we simply choose each year
which things fit in and don’t worry about the things we don’t get to. We
don’t need to make a gingerbread house every year to still have it as a
tradition - a thing we sometimes do. This brings me to an important point -
since joy is central to celebrating Advent, don’t let celebrating Advent
become the thing that you carry like a burden. Do what you can joyfully do,
and ask God to give you more capacity year after year.
While we do make an Advent wreath with candles to light every Sunday of
Advent, we celebrate Advent as the 24 days of December leading up to
Christmas. For our Advent wreath, I usually use a little wooden bucket
filled with rock salt. The candles (four tall red or white ones, one white
central one because I do not like the traditional pink and purple), and
some kind of embellishment to make it pretty. We light one candle at every
Sabbath dinner in December, with the final central candle (the Christ
candle) being lit at the Christmas dinner.
My mom used to give her grandkids Christmas PJ’s on the first Sabbath of
Advent, but that became unwieldy when a lot of kids who are not her
grandchildren were coming to Sabbath and we didn’t want to have anyone
left out. Because of that, we started kicking off the Christmas and Advent
season with a morning after Thanksgiving Christmas kick off party. We
gather for breakfast (which is leftover pie, coffee, orange juice, and
whatever egg or sausage we come up with). Because we usually host
thanksgiving, when everyone goes home we throw away all the pumpkins,
bust out some Christmas decor, cover the island in a wild (often cheap
vinyl) Christmas tablecloth, and get out the paper plates. It is a very
leisurely morning - I get out a Christmas puzzle, or card games - and the
kids get in their pajamas from Nana, and we all just hang out to Christmas
music! It's a hilarious way to start the season because we almost always
still have some dishes from Thanksgiving on the counter - but I cannot
think of a more joyful and relaxed way to begin the month-long party.
This is also the time when I get out all the Christmas books, and put them
in a crate on the hearth or somewhere cozy. Every year we expand our
collection, and every year we love to get them out and remember our
favorites.
The Calendar Itself
The anchor point for our Advent celebration is some kind of an Advent
calendar. We have done many different things through the years, though
the point has always been the same. First we made a big wooden star that
we painted silver and put twenty four hooks on for the days. I made a
bunch of small oilcloth envelopes with an eyelet in the corner and hung
those on the hooks. Each hook was numbered, so each day we would open
an envelope. Inside were a little cards I had made that had an activity
pictured on them. I used the card making section of a craft store and found
a surprising amount of ideas for Advent fun from those.
This was in the time when our kids were too little to read and the pictures
were more understandable and also more fun. When we had opened an
envelope we left the card hanging in front of it. This made it fun to look at
and remember what we had done already in
December. It was with this Advent Calendar that I learned one of my most
important rules - never put the surprise in the envelope until you KNOW
that you are going to do the thing! Nothing is worse than opening
something that says you are going to get the Christmas tree when your
parents are actually too tired to pull it off. Get used to the fact that this
partying this hard will always be a little slapdash and not overly planned. I
think that is really a gift too because it makes you think on your feet a lot
more. What would be delightful right at this moment, and how can we
make it into Advent fun? This is a habit that is useful year round.
This Calendar also helped us treat as a celebration the things that are
normal Holiday activities. We had a card for pizza night, for popcorn and a
movie, for setting a pretty table, for coloring pictures, making cookies,
painting nails, playing Scrabble, hanging up a wreath, etc. It’s amazing
how little it actually takes to build excitement and joy about Christmas! It’s
familiar to us all to hear “Jesus is the reason for the season” but the
Christian reality is that Jesus is the reason for everything. In Him and
through Him and by Him are all things. Without Him, nothing was made
that was made. It is not at all a theological stretch to celebrate the birth of
Jesus with everything, and anything. If you do not have money, celebrate
(and I mean celebrate) the free and cheap things. Delight in the many good
gifts God has given you. There are probably all manner of things you could
forage outside for decor, there are many fun decorations that can be made
out of paper. My kids enjoy decorating their rooms with enormous 3D
snowflakes hanging from their ceilings. If you have paper and scissors you
can do a lot!
One year I made twenty four little pouches out of cardstock and double
sided tape - they look like little sour cream pouches. We sealed some kind
of treat into those, but it would be a fun way to deliver tiny ornaments, or
little messages, or whatever fun thing you can think of.
As long as I have little people who wanted to touch all the Christmas
ornaments in the house, I keep a basket of soft ornaments - mostly
animals and felt ornaments somewhere in the living room. I’m always a fan
of teaching little kids to obey and not touch, but I found it a good
combination to get a very prickly tree and a welcoming basket of things
they knew they could get into. Just like the Lord giving us the Sabbath, I
never want the children to be for the Christmas decorations instead of the
Christmas decorations being for the children.
We moved out of the enormous star when I knit mittens for every day of
Advent, and this is what we still use as our primary Advent Calendar.
Initially the mittens were hung on a garland with a huge pom pom on
either end of it but something must have happened to that. I now hang
them on an old ladder I painted green, and the kids take turns opening a
mitten. Since all of my children can now read, usually I simply write
something in there that is a clue to what the surprise is. This is also very
simple, and I still abide by the rule of not putting the clue in the mitten
until I am ready and confident in the surprise. My youngest son will
sometimes bring me the mitten, a piece of paper, and a sharpie. “Here you
go, Mom. Let’s do Advent now.” Our surprises are still not earth shattering
or excessive - but it does not matter at all. While there are certainly days
where I just put some chocolate in the mitten or candy canes, the mitten
usually contains a clue to something with a little more fun in it. So what are
all of these things and clues and riddles leading to?
What’s the Surprise?
That’s the question, isn’t it - how do you make the normal fun? It is
important to note here that the single biggest way you make normal things
fun for your children is by you yourself being the normal fun thing. Your
delight will always be contagious, your joy is the main gift to them.
Christmas baking is a fun and regular part of the season. We do not usually
make that the Advent surprise of the day, but we might! So if you decide to
make the gingerbread village, there is no reason not to get an Advent
surprise out of it too. But because baking is a significant part of our
December, we have a different way of handling that.
Edible Advent Surprises:
Chocolate Snowmen or Teddy Bears (the small Lindt ones, wrapped in foil).
I find them in the grocery store seasonal things and stash them away for
some easy day. To make it more fun, I hide them somewhere in the
Christmas decor and give a simple clue to their location.
Terry’s Chocolate Orange - this is an incredibly easy surprise so save it for
one of those days when you aren’t being clever! I hide it somewhere and
put a clue in the mitten.
Eggnog! This is the kind of thing I would usually make an after school treat.
To make it more fun and silly, arrange a cute tray of glasses and straws
and hide it somewhere unexpected in the house. I’ve for sure used the
linen closet, the oven, and the bathtub. Make the tray look like a party and
a party it will be! Last year it was in the dryer, on top of a load of laundry
with battery powered tea lights.
Oranges with Bob’s Candy Candy Canes. This is a messy but fun little trick.
Take a fresh orange and roll it on the table under a little pressure to make
it juicy. Then take an unwrapped Bob’s (these seem to work the best, but
other brands are ok) candy cane, and break the hook off. Use the straight
bit and stab it into the orange. The candy cane will work like a straw to the
orange juice. It gets easier as you go along because the juice digs channels
in the candy cane as you suck the juice up around the outside of it. When
my kids were little we did this one in the bathtub. Now they are old enough
to trust with sticky things and a group bath is a thing of the long past!
Biscoff on pears or apples. This is also an after school snack, and takes
very little preparation, but is certainly celebratory! You could definitely use
Nutella here too!
Christmas Clean up milkshake - this is more fun and more effective if you
have been given a lot of Christmas cookies. We make a vanilla milkshake
and then crumble in the whole assortment of cookies. Terrifying,
memorable, hilarious, and colorful!
Make a kit of all the ingredients for Chex Mix, and the assignment of
making it. This is especially fun if it feels a little above the ability of the
kids. Give them the kitchen! Let them feel big! The muddy buddies, or
puppy chow (also on the Chex box) is another option here because it is
easily made in a bag and shaken, and doesn’t involve any oven time.
Hide a bowl full of nuts and nutcrackers somewhere in the house. Expect
shrapnel, it’s part of the fun. Alternately, without the nutcrackers, lay out
newspapers on the table and have a peanut in the shell party.
My kids love fruit, so we often make unusual or fun fruit the Advent
surprise. It wouldn’t be advent without a round of pomegranates for the
surprise. Again, these would be smuggled in the house sometime and then
hidden somewhere with a clue.
Ninjabread boys, or a Christmas village. My kids love these cookies, and as
the years have gone by we have expanded to making houses and scenes -
I simply make little support pieces which we stick with a firm icing onto
the back so they stand up. We have done these when we are having people
over to dinner (or on a sabbath evening) so it makes the centerpiece
somewhere, but it all gets eaten and thrown away very quickly! As much as
we enjoy it, I do not want things like this around the house for a whole
month!
Advent Activities:
The obvious: getting the Christmas tree, driving around to see the lights,
hanging up stockings,
The easy: ordering pizza, painting nails, movie night, going out to a fun
restaurant, or ordering in and eating with chopsticks, playing a board game
or a card game you already have
Raclette - this is half activity, half food. Raclette is a cheese that you melt
in little pans on a grill. You serve it with sausages, cornichons, steamed
tiny potatoes, veggies, and anything you can think of that would be good
with a mild but delicious melted cheese. While you have to buy the grill,
you can get many years of fun use out of one and it is a very low-prep meal
for a very festive output. Since all of the ingredients for this will keep well
in the fridge or pantry, it is easy to keep up your sleeve for a last minute
thriller. This would be a good candidate for Christmas Eve dinner too! Our
favorite things to have with it are sausage, sourdough, apples, and
potatoes. The idea is that each person cooks their own mini meals on the
grill while their cheese melts.
Sock snowball fight, or the sock turkey shoot - Have the kids bring socks to
Mom and Dad who sit on the couch. Socks get all balled up, and then
thrown at the kids. The kids can be behind a couch popping up (turkey
shoot), trying to pass through the room with a slipper on their head, or any
other version of this you can think up. This one comes to me directly from
my own childhood - and while I think it was a spur of the moment idea my
dad had it was very fun and very memorable. Fun enough to get repeated a
whole generation later!
The great hopscotch - for this surprise we gift our kids a roll of painters
tape. We tape a giant hopscotch down the hall or across your biggest
room. Divide the family (or whoever is there!) into teams, and start at each
end. On “go”, the first in line on each side races to the middle. When they
meet in the middle, they play rock paper scissors to see who stays on and
who gets out. As soon as someone gets out, the next player on their team
hops as fast as they can to stop the progress of the other team. The goal of
this game is to get all the way to the other team.
Jammy Ride - another fond memory from my childhood! This is when you
let everyone get in their beds before yelling “Jammy Ride!” And taking
them all out for a treat, or to look at the lights, or something like that. Many
Jammy rides of my youth were driving through McDonalds for an ice cream
sundae and then stopping by my Grandparents house to say hi.
Christmas Dance Party - When our kids were little this was almost always
to the Big Bad Voodoo Daddy’s song Mr. Heatmiser. Nothing like a big wild
pajama dance party to get the energy out!
A Christmas Snowscape - if you buy lollipop sticks and gumdrops in
assorted colors and sizes, you can skewer them onto the sticks to make
Christmas trees and snowmen and stick them into the sugar to look like a
sweet snow globe scene. We have done this in apothecary jars in the living
room, or just in the clear sugar canister on the kitchen counter.
One year we made a huge paper mache snowman together over several
days and the kids painted it. We made the original form out of balloons,
and while it was a mess it was also lots of fun. Not sure if I actually
recommend this one or not, but it has come up in the fond memories of my
children more than once! If you used punching balloons you could get a
quite big snowman!
Do a sketching challenge - on a timer, everyone in the family draws the
same Christmas still life.
Making salt dough ornaments to hang on the tree. These work well with
stamps.
Huge Peppermint shaped sticker decals that are easily removable make a
fun gift that easily turns into many games. We play peppermint lava tag
(you can only stand on the peppermints!) in our hall to raucous Christmas
music.
Once when Luke had to go somewhere for a meeting in the evening the
kids and I ran to Walmart and bought an inflatable penguin yard
decoration. They could not imagine anything wittier than setting him up in
the living room chair in a little Christmas scene and turning all the lights off
(pretending to be asleep) and surprise Daddy when he came home. This is
an example of unplanned but memorable and delightful shenanigans.
Advent is a time when silly fun definitely makes an appearance!
Advent Gifts:
Small gifts are hidden in funny places, but often it is a “go look under your
pillow” kind of clue.
A New Christmas book to add to the collection
A coloring book or craft supplies
Christmas socks - We got a lot of miles out of nutcracker socks, and other
years have done simple cozy socks. There have been animal socks. Socks
of all kinds! The older our kids get the more likely this is to be a nice wool
sock!
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever on audio - if you have never listened to
this, you really should. It remains brilliant year after year! The book is
obviously just fun, so it would make a good seasonal read aloud too.
Whatever you do, don’t go without it!
A Christmas puzzle
A paper snowflake making party. My kids love to make the huge 3d
snowflakes out of cardstock and decorate their rooms with them.
One of the best things about celebrating Advent as a parent is how it
impacts your living the rest of the year. It is a shockingly healthy exercise
to be on a daily schedule of joyfully appreciating small and ordinary things.
Not just noticing it or thinking of it, but communicating it in a delightful
way to your children. This is the sort of effort that gives you muscles you
may not have realized you were missing.
When we are full of joy, it opens the eyes of our children to whatever we
are looking at. They want to look at it with us. This is an incredible tool in
parenting, although it does raise the bar for the parent. I can think of no
better way to celebrate and mark the incarnation than to be persistently
joyful - celebrating joy, using joy, calling one another to joy. For the
Christian, all this joy is not baseless. We are not pretending that an elf is
going to bring toys if only we believe hard enough. Instead, we are building
on the source of all joy - the Lord Jesus. We are celebrating freedom from
sin, we are celebrating that God is with us. And this is why it is so good for
us as parents to limber up and schedule in a whole month of joyous
celebration. It is so good for us to look at the life all around us and see the
endless gifts in it. It is good for us to expand our capacity to celebrate. We
are becoming more like our Heavenly Father
Preparing your kids for disappointment
The pattern:
4 size 8 double point needles (I vote for bamboo)
worsted weight wool in multiple colors (I used Lion Brand wool in hot pink,
red, and white, and Cascade wool yarn in heathery red and aqua, and two
shades of solid green)
gauge: doesn’t so much matter (yay!)
extras: stitch marker, tapestry needle, and scrap yarn (but we all know you
have that already)
Mitten (make 24)
cast on 26 stitches loosely onto a double point needle. Evenly divide
stitches between three needles, place a marker at the beginning and join,
being careful not to twist.
Rows 1-5knit in a P1, K1 rib, slipping marker at the beginning of each row
Row 6-11knit every row
Row 12K12 , place marker(PM), K2, PM, knit to end of row
Row 13Knit to marker, slip marker, M1 ( make one by lifting up stitch in
front of stitch on needle and knit through the back loop), knit to last stitch
before marker, M1, slip marker and knit to the end.
Row 14Knit
Row 15Increase 2 stitches in the same manner as before
Row 16Knit
Row 17Increase as before -8 stitches between markers
Row 18Knit to marker, slip stitches between markers onto scrap yarn, knit
to end of row
Knit continuously until piece measures about 4 inches
Decrease row 1(K2, K2 tog) all the way around
Decrease row 2Knit
Decrease row 3(K2 tog, K1) all the way around
Decrease row 4Knit
Decrease row 5K2 tog the whole way around
cut yarn and thread the tail onto your tapestry needle, and then through
each of your remaining stitches twice. Pull tight and weave in your end
Thumb:slide your eight stitches onto three dp needles, and start new
yarn. Knit 5 or six rows. Work one decrease row by knitting two together
the whole way around, and close with a tapestry needle the same way as
before. Weave the tail down and close the join of the thumb to the mitten
body if necessary.
Later, when I finish all the mittens I will figure out what I am doing for the
loop up top. It will probably just be a crocheted chain loop with an
occasional pom pom on the end, and the numbers will probably be
different. Some embroidered, and some in duplicate stitch.
note:I did not include any comments about switching colors, but the
majority of mine are contrast at the rib only, although there are stripes and
other patterns occasionally. I will leave that part up to you and your
creative genius, just make sure that the mitten will still show a number
well.
Christmas Caramels
Melt 1 c. butter in a heavy bottom large pan. Stir in 1 lb. light brown sugar,
dash of salt, 1 c. light corn syrup, and 1 can sweetened condensed milk.
Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until it reaches a firm ball
stage. I just put a bowl of cold water by the stove and drop a blob in from
time to time. When it is cool and you lift it up, it should hold its shape well
without being brittle. This will probably take 10 minutes or so. Remove
from heat and stir in a teaspoon or so of vanilla.
I line a pan (one step up from 11x15) with a parchment sheet first. Stir a
few biggish handfuls of pretzel sticks into the caramel crushing lightly by
squeezing, a generous splash of salted peanuts (I think we use at least a
cup, probably more), and then 2 cups or so of mini marshmallows. Pour
the caramel into the pan, make sure it gets below and around all the
goodies but not stirring the now melty marshmallows completely in, and
pop in the fridge. When it is cooled and set, lift the block out by the
parchment, chop off a row and cut into cubes. We wrap them in parchment
to keep them from forming a new blob on a plate. Keeping them in the
fridge helps too.
