This is a new event we are going to do each weekend so that we can get to know each other better. Please tell your friends, and join in with your stellar opinions! Feel free to drop links to your writing or the writing of others that you would like to recommend on the subject too. Here’s the first topic:
What do you do in your home
for Advent, whether you are
single, newly wed, or parents?
33 thoughts on “SOCIALIS SATURDAY Advent Ideas”
This is only my second Advent since converting, but last year I observed the ember days after the Feast of St. Lucy. I just didn’t have the resources to buy or make anything with the end of the semester, so it was a good way to participate without much planning ahead.
Well,
Advent for me within the geographical disposition that I live in means focusing on the MAIN REASON for December to Remember, King Jesus Christ Himself.
Well, we at the South of the Sahara in Africa are not into shopping perse but into the historic significant of the season. No snow. No Santa only Christ and appreciation the reason he came into the world and also reflecting on the year, planning ahead.
Delali
Being a Benedictine Oblate, I have found that “The Joy of Advent with Saint Benedict” (by Father John Fortin) to be a great daily Advent meditation on the gospel of the day. Heard about it on the Sonrise Morning radio show and downloaded it to my Kindle that day. I’m burning some monster (3″ diam) candles in my Advent wreath that were sent to me from St Bernard’s candle shop in Cullman, Alabama, but no Santa and no tree for me. I’ll remember Saint Nicholas on his feast day next week and trees don’t evoke any Christ-child images for me. Instead I recall my Latin teacher telling me it goes back to the barbarians hanging dead Centurions from the evergreens at the foot of the alps to warn the Roman Army not to come any farther.
Rise 30 minutes early. Find a special place to pray. Read the scriptures chosen for the day. http://Www.usccb.org/bible/readings is good. Reflect. Be open to what is communicated to you. Respond by praising God, making supplication for yourself and others and thanking Jesus for Advent and all of His promises.
I won’t be able to do much for Advent in my home, but I’m trying to attend Mass as often as possible and revive my prayer life! The readings at Mass during Advent (get them here) are some of my favorite parts of Scripture.
My religious community consciously journeys with Mary in her waiting, pondering anew the words of the Annunciation by the Angel that she would bear the Son of God. In part, we are helped in this meditation by means of our novena for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, where we meditate on Mary’s being set apart by grace, “being conceived without sin”. She becomes a mirror of our original state before our fall from grace in the Garden of Eden. And thus, we use this Advent time to contemplate how Mary is the door of restoration to our original state through the Word made Flesh – Jesus – through His dwelling among us, ultimately, in His greatest act of love on the Cross. Blessed Advent journey, everyone!
My family didn’t really do Advent, and in college, Advent is called “Finals” so this is the first year I’m actually observing it. Ryan and I have an Advent Wreath which we are trying to get in the habit of praying over each night. I wrote a little bit of what an Advent Wreath is an icluded some helpful links over at my blog, The Alluring World. I Was trying to do the whole “Keep Christmas out of Advent” thing by not decorating my house until late in the season, but for one, my husband was NOT OK with that, and two, it kind of stuck me as un-Advent to NOT prepare for Christmas. I mean, the whole season is meant as a preparation of ourselves to celebrate the birth of the Christ Child, and one way we celebrate his birth here is to decorate our homes to welcome him in, the same way a woman decorates her home for the impending birth of her baby. I’m actually thinking about writing about that, because honestly it’s kind of a novel concept for me. And speaking of “nesting moms”, Simcha Fisher posted a fun, easy advent activity for moms with young children over at her blog
@Allie – observing the ember days sounds like a great way to participate in Advent during college, I wish I had known about them then!
Currently we are sleeping only about 3 hours a day. We have a newborn and an almost-2yr-old that has decided she doenst really want to sleep any longer.
Honestly, though, as a newlywed couple we want to do certain things as a family, but havent had the resources in the past two years since moving to Alaska. I think it is important when you are married that you prepare for certain things, such as Advent, but planning ahead a bit.
For instance: we dont have an Advent wreath. No big deal right? We can just go buy one… wrong! Where we live, there really isn’t … anywhere. So we have had to make do… but it would be nice to have… well, a nice one. Same goes for lots of holiday stuff. My suggestion is that if family members ask what you want for Weddings, Births, or Christmas… that you politely request things like Advent wreaths and other holiday traditional items that are important to you, but that you might not otherwise already have.
With four little ones homeschooling, we have plenty of opportunities to make Advent special….now we just have to actually do it! We’ve struggled to find good traditions that are age appropriate and that the kids will take part in. This year (finally!) we’ve been able to adopt a decade of the rosary each night with lighting the Advent candles and reading some special prayers before bed. This is still hard, but we’re sticking it out and praying that soon they’ll stop swinging rosaries around and crawling behind the furniture. Oh, and we’re also doing little disposable Advent calendars that the kids LOVE. And we’re moving Mary and Joseph from the nativity set around the house as they seek shelter.
My family doesn’t do much during Advent. We usually have an Advent wreath around, but as I look around right now, it hasn’t appeared yet.
My boyfriend and I are praying the Magnificat Advent Companion together, and I am planning on going to confession at some point during the season. Hoping this post will spark some more idea of what I can do!
To Joseph K, Advent Wreaths can take many forms. Here are a few examples:
– Some people have Advent candles without a wreath. Others who live in a part of the world where colored candles are impossible to find, can use white, 3 tied with purple ribbon, and one with pink to mark the weeks.
– In our missions, our volunteers can’t even find candles, so they decided to make paper candles, affixing them to the wall in the dining room, adding a flame to an additional candle each week.
– In Italy, I ended up making our advent wreath; I didn’t have pine trees to work with (since Roman pines are too tall to cut branches), so I used cuttings from spruce trees and worked them into a wreath. I then used regular candle holders for each one of the candles.
Anyone else have a creative way to carry on this tradition in the home?
Up until recently my family hasn’t been very much into our religion, so it’s been difficult to do anything for Advent, but this year I’ve started a prayer chain in addition to our Advent wreath. 😀
I’m doing several interesting things this advent. On my blog I am hosting “WORDLESS ADVENT” along with the 26 Days of Christmas. In Wordless Advent I am posting a “digital gift” a picture or video of some sort to represent christmas or advent of different things I find cute/interesting. A lot of it has been crafts you can think about making I’ve found on pinterest.
The 26 Days of Christmas are just different christmas questions I have been answering 🙂
I have an advent wreath I STILL need to put together all the supplies are on my desk. I have also been going to an advent reflection at my church on Tuesday nights.
When I was a kid and we lived in Spain we’d visit my family in the North and Christmas itself was about great food and celebration, but no gifts or Santa! We’d decorate a big tree outside with old and homemade ornaments. Christmas Day was pretty much about church, eating, and the village “parade”. On January 5, all us kids would leave a pair of shoes out by the tree (usually boots for more space!) and then on Three Kings Day (Jan. 6) we’d find little presents and gifts inside them left for us by the three wise men (Melchior, Balthasar, and Gaspar). It was really quite magical! This freed up Christmas and Advent for being all about other things like caroling, prayer, Christ and Mary (if you wanted, the temptations to shop-til-you-drop were still there!). Lately, I’ve been missing that, so I’ve been praying and thinking about to make Advent a lot more meaningful this year. I’ve been doing all my shopping on fair trade sites like Serrv.org (gifts made all over the world by local crafters), Etsy, and even the lovely nuns of Seignadou Soaps. This frees up a lot of my time for doing the Mass readings and novenas and things!
We have an Advent wreath, a Nativity scene countdown to Christmas, and I’m trying to read the daily readings and pray more.
First I want to say that I’m not 100% on top of any of these things!
We have our manger set up in the dining room with the shepherds and sheep out “in the hill country” (aka further down on the buffet), the Wise Men in the east (our living room), and Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem (on the Advent Wreath). We have an Advent Wreath that we light at meals; at lunch the kids and I say, “come Lord Jesus, Come!” and at dinner my husband reads a reflection from an Advent book by Fulton Sheen. We also have a Jesse Tree; there’s one ornament for every day of Advent and we usually hang 2-4 at a time because I’m bad at it.
The easiest thing we did was make a paper chain from purple and pink construction paper. Each day the kids take a link off as we count down for Christmas. We also practice singing Happy Birthday to Jesus. Kids love birthdays…
And then you can read a little about our St. Nicholas traditions on my Dear Santa post here at IT. 🙂
My wife and I have a toddler, and another child is on the way in March.
We have prayed the Advent wreath every year since we married, using the liturgy of the hours. We light the candle while singing the tune “Light one candle for…” (and add Love, Hope, Joy, then Peace as each week progresses). Then we follow the hours format. Lastly, we open the door of the calendar before extinguishing the candle. Starting on the 17th, we pray the O Antiphons. I’ve thought about doing the Jesse Tree, but we don’t want to get too crowded.
This year we introduced a calendar with chocolate, to get/keep our toddler engaged in the process. Before she gets the piece of chocolate behind each door, she says who she wants to pray for that day. [Eventually, as she grows, we will have something similar to the felt banner my dad made when I was growing up, where the Star rests on the house of a family whose intention we pray for, as the Star journeys to Bethlehem.]
We’ve taken to doing the Advent wreath in the early evening, rather than at bedtime, because my wife has to get up early for work and our toddler brushes teeth at bedtime and doesn’t need chocolate in her teeth at that point.
Plus my wife and I have our evening devotional at bedtime, which consists of renewing our Total Consecration to Mary up until Dec.8th, in anticipation of our Dec.13th anniversary, just as we did the Advent leading up to our wedding day (our wedding bands are Montfort Consecration rings).
On St. Lucy’s Day, the 13th, who is patron of Light and patron of our marriage, we place electric candles in the windows, to indicate to the outside world- who’ve had their lights on display since Halloween- that the season is getting closer, that Christ the Light of the World is getting nearer.
My wife and I debated heatedly when to start decorating. I grew up in a home that didn’t take down Advent colors until Dec.23 or 24th. My wife grew up in a home that put up a tree two weeks before Christmas. So the candles in the window are a compromise. We also agreed to put out the creche on St. Lucy’s Day.
I grew up putting the three kings in different parts of the house and moving them closer to the stable in the days leading to the Epiphany on Jan.6th, and I hope eventually to have a figurine of Mary on the donkey with Joseph leading her to the stable and getting closer each day leading up to the 24th.
We always did celebrate Dec. 6th by putting our shoes out, but I really like the idea proposed here in the Letter to Santa– of doing stockings on the 6th and gifts on the 25th. We have not started stockings yet, because we are always traveling to grandparents’ houses, and they still have our stockings from our childhood. I’m going to discuss this idea with my wife!
We also have a tradition form my family that we have continued into our marriage of blessing the house on the Epiphany, proceeding from room to room with holy water while singing “We Three Kings” and using the prayers from Prayers for the Domestic Church and inscribing the lintel of the front door with the new year “20+C+M+B+__” which my wife and I both did in our college dorm rooms.
The last family tradition I’d like to mention comes from my parents, who every year put out luminaries on Christmas Eve, to welcome the Christ child up to our door. We never had electric lights for the purpose of keeping the significance of the luminaries. Our Dec. 13th tradition in our marriage is an homage to the luminaries of my youth, and I’ve heard they do something similar in Mexico for the feast of OLOGuadalupe.
Sadly, her day gets lost in my enthusiasm for St. Lucy. She’s important to us this year, since my wife is with child. Is there anything we can do on the 12th? We’ll pray for the victims of abortion certainly, but how to impart that to a toddler??
p.s. My wife and I always give newlyweds an Advent wreath as our wedding gift (unless we know they won’t use it) because it is so important to begin traditions in your home as a family BEFORE you have children.
Joseph K– don’t have an advent wreath? No problem (I’d mail you one if I could, but that would mean giving a stranger your address). Instead, use four pillar candles and place them in the shape of a cross, then encircle them with greenery. Or tie a sprig of greenery to each candle with a purple/pink ribbon.
Anna Williams- I’m like you, trying to pray and attend Mass more often. The Advent concept, separate from Christmas, is new for me. I’ve got to wrap my head around it before starting any big traditions.
Kayla Peterson- My husband wouldn’t like a decoration-less house either, and not decorating does seem contrary to the joy of Advent. I like imagining how Mary must have felt anticipating the birth of her firstborn son and the Lord: How did she prepare?
I used to have a little Advent calendar with Scripture verses each day, but the dog ate it. Maybe a wreath would be more durable. 🙂
@SWP I LOVE your idea of giving newlyweds an Advent wreath! That is such a thoughtful and practical gift. I have friends that will get people a “cross” for a gift and I’m like catholics have SOOOOOO many crosses it’s not even funny (at least we do my mom has about 10 in her room bc ppl are always giving them to her) Advent wreaths (esp purple and pink candles) can be SOO hard to find!
I think I need to invite you to my wedding so I get a cool gift 😉 jk
I love reading all these awesome advent traditions. Makes me want to incorporate some of them into my life 🙂
I am attempting to make the Advent season my Little Lent. The way I am attempting this is making opportunities to do penance, pray and give. On Sundays, I am reading a book entitled, The Sermons of St. Bernard on Advent & Christmas. Ignatius Press is the publisher for those who might be interested. May we all prepare our hearts this Advent for the coming of the Christ-Child. May Jesus find room in the throne-room of our humble hearts this Christmas season.
Anytime I’m near a Catholic bookstore, I try to see if there are some inexpensive wire Advent wreaths on sale. Often they get marked down post-season. Grand Rapids has The Angelus or the Baraga bookstore, Detroit has many including Fuchs or the Chancery, Cincinnati has the Franciscan bookstore, Iowa has a few, Minneapolis has one downtown. There is an Irish supply store near my parents house and the woman there was selling Autom wire wreaths for only $5.00 each and I bought her whole shelf and give them away as wedding presents. You can also go to Bronner’s in Frankenmuth, MI and get different types.
I believe the wreath should be a circle and never anything that looks like a candelabra. The candles can sometimes even be found at Christian bookstores. Or they will order them for you. or- again- you could tie ribbons round a white taper. In college I had to be careful the RA didn’t see me lighting candles indoors, so I used four little votives on a gold plate with a few sprigs and kept it it the closet and only pulled it out for prayer. So even if you have a round plate with pillars on it, you can evoke a circle.
Or get an inexpensive wreath from a Boy Scout and put candlesticks around it. There’s no excuse in my book for not praying the Advent wreath each year.
I dont know if any of the catholic giftshops here sell advent wreaths. My mom made some advent wreaths with the the faith formation families and gave me the leftovers to make my own wreath. We used purple and pink votives I’ll be posting a picture on my blog one day this week 🙂
I’ve always had an advent wreath in my house, so now that I’m in college I was going a little crazy without an Advent counter (especially because, as Kayla says, Advent is called “Finals” here) so I resorted to scrounging the things around my desk. http://witheagerfeet.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/to-kick-off-advent/
My family also used to do the daily disposable Advent calendar, but still does the Nativity scene–my mom sets up her collection of creches all over the house, hides all the Baby Jesuses in the same place, then the Wise Men travel the house looking for the Christ Child. Mary and Joseph are just ahead of the game (and having to keep track of five sets of Mary and Joseph AND Wise Men would be a little crazy).
~Ink
In my house we’ve often had Advent calendars in the past. We also put up a Nativity scene every year (usually a few weeks prior to Christmas). Alas, we haven’t had Advent wreaths, as much as I’d like to have one. I’d love to have one now, but I’m fairly sure open flames in dorm rooms are disallowed. I like to listen to chants associated with Advent (Veni Veni Emmanuel) or with the themes of Advent (First and Second Comings, Last Judgment), as well. I’d love to learn to chant the O Antiphons.
~Quill
Advent is a bleak and not-easy time for single Catholics, especially older singles, with all the season’s social activities and news of new families and children. We develop coping strategies over time, so it’s mostly a manageable problem, but there are hard moments. Please remember us in your prayers!
@ Bob I agree. Sometimes I think the holidays are worse for single ppl than valentine’s day. The holidays are esp hard as the last few years I haven’t had any money.
@ Bob and @ Beth Anne, Yes, I remember those days, before I entered the convent and lived six hours away from home. The Advent time was indeed tough!!!
What can we do to help it be lighter for you and others who feel the same way? Can we adopt you for the day? Meet you for coffee? Invite you to our Church festivals? What can make the burden of this time less so?
Thank you @ sister and thank you @Beth Anne. It’s a pretty unprecedented situation. The number of Catholic marriages per year is only one-third of what it used to be as recently as the eighties. In parallel there has been an explosion in the number of Catholic singles over 40 will almost certainly never never have children of their own and will quite possibly never marry at all. It comes as quite a shock to faithful, practicing Catholics who have ordered their lives toward marriage and family, swimming against the current tides, but who find that they have missed that vocation. We don’t want to be “recognized” or “celebrated” or “supported” as being single–we want to be not-single and living the married vocation we feel called to and have not realized. I don’t know what you can do about it except pray and work toward a culture–in the Church, at least–that is more supportive of the married vacation. There is pretty much nothing for the over 25s. The occasional prayer for single Catholics at intercessions during mass would be helpful. Involuntary, protracted singleness is not a passing state of live for many people nowadays.
Ink- don’t forget flameless electric tealights, which can be found at WalMart for 98cents. My wife had to use those in her classroom when the principal saw she was using tapers. We burned a pillar down deep enough to make a well for the tealight to fit inside.
Quill– the Dominicans central province provides the O Antiphons in chant form. I can’t find the index link for all seven, but here is O Emmanuel:
Bob- Advent is not just for children. They countdown to Baby Jesus. But as adults, we are to prepare for the Second Coming by examining our conscience, maybe some fasting, works of mercy, and definitely developing our spirituality these four weeks.
Have you considered eHarmony? I’m sorry, but protracted singlehood is voluntary nowadays. Maybe consider developing a fitness regimen as an act of penance during Advent and offer up your sorrows to the Lord? No matter what our state in life, we are called to fulfill our baptismal vocation by making our daily labors a work of the Kingdom. The more you live on fire with Jesus, the more you will become content with the day Jesus has made ready for you. If that day happens to include finding a soulmate, bonus. If that day happens to include your remaining single, then praise God for His will being done. Offer it up, surrender to Divine Providence, and never stop thanking God, good or ill. Go to adoration more often. Read the desert fathers. Pray the liturgy of the hours. Fill your life with Jesus and you won’t be alone.
Also- do you have nieces or nephews with whom you could pray the Advent wreath? There are children whose dads are in prison or afghanistan- could you make their Christmas brighter? Find ways to step outside your self. Again, fill your day with Jesus (who comes to us in the Poor- have you visited a prison or homeless shelter lately?).
I am waaaay late to the game, but this is so fun! We have an Advent wreath, a nativity (that my grandmother made!) on our mantle, and plan in future years when the little one (almost one year old) is a bit older to do a Jesse tree. Oh, the excitement of Advent with little ones!
SWP-when I get a chance to swing by anywhere to obtain the tealights, I will absolutely do so. In the meantime, I’m kind of trapped here–hence the ghetto wreath. However I love that idea!
~Ink
Quill, the best Advent Chant, imo, is Rorate Caeli Desuper. It is amazing.