Advent 2023

-

Since the kids were little, Advent has been a very special time filled with activities and traditions created intentionally. Here's what I wrote about it in 2019 and we still do all those things. My aim in choosing and creating traditions was to help the kids build anticipation over the season, focus on why we celebrate (it's Jesus' birthday!) and to try and take the focus away a bit from the receiving stuff to the idea of giving as well.

Most of the things here we've been doing for years now, but this year for the first time we're doing a 'Jesse Tree' (going through the Bible leading up to the birth of Christ, one event at a time) as well.

As every year, we have the obligatory chocolate advent calendars as well as an Advent Wreath with four candles on it. Every Sunday in Advent we light another one, so that we end up with four lit candles by Christmas.



There's also the reuseable Advent Calendar which has an 'activity' card in it every day (pro tip: I'm not writing on the card until the night before!) - activities are Christmassy things like writing cards, baking cookies, and taking chocolate to say thanks to those that serve us (more on that later!)


As we go through the days, chocolate is taken out and Jesse Tree ornaments go up


Mary and Joseph (and the donkey) have also started their journey to Bethlehem. They're found in a different place very morning.


On 6th December, St Nicholas came to fill their boots with good things!



One of our absolute favourite traditions, which we've kept up for years now, is to go to those services that look after us - firefighters, doctor, dentist, police etc. - with chocolate, to say thank you. I don't always take photos, as it's more about being in the moment, but this year I got a few. My personal favourite visit was to our doctor's surgery where the receptionist got all the staff to come out to meet us and the kids then insisted we sing our Christmas carol of the year... which we did, me feeling very on-the-spot but the kids sang with great gusto!






Some of our Advent activities (as per the activities calendar mentioned above) are simple things at home, like decorating, baking and doing Christmas cards - they love putting them into the neighbours' letterboxes - and some are special activites outside the house, like going ice skating or visiting the Christmas special at our local zoo.





Shortcrust pastry and nutella - simple but effective!

Of course, we visited Santa Claus in his grotto (with marshmallows afterwards!), and celebrated with our friends at the home ed co-operative. And we received gifts from the kids' aunties in Vienna!







Christmas special at the home ed co-op


Tomorrow it's Christmas (Eve) so it's time to bring this post to an end - there will be a year-end post before long though. Merry Christmas everyone!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Home Ed Questions: what about socialisation?

-
Image
Last week, a reporter and cameraman from the BBC visited our house to do a feature about home education. It was great fun, a real adventure for the kids to be interviewed! The team spent 90 minutes at our house, but of course they had to condense that down to a couple of minutes for the feature, and sadly the kids' interviews didn't make the cut. (A transcript article of the feature is here ) I had put my hand up for doing this because the reporter had every intention to make this a positive piece on home education, and so it was; the premise was to try and answer why there had been such an uptick in home education in the past few years. They interviewed two mothers, probably strategically chosen: me as the one who always wanted to home educate, and the other mum as someone who felt she had to due to her son's needs.  They interviewed me at length, and of course only a few seconds of that made it to the screen, but inevitably it was the part to do with social skills that th
Read more

Thrown into to a new reality, then back to the old

-
Image
Towards the end of August this year, Mr. and I suddenly faced a very different future to the one we had envisioned: at 42 years old - and he's 55 - I found myself pregnant again. Camping after our summer trip - and I've just found out I'm pregnant As it's been seven years since D(7) was born, we really didn't expect that. We would have loved more kids soon after D, but I just never got pregnant. Seven years on, we were pretty convinced that this was our lot. Two beautiful children, we really can't complain! So we needed a bit of time to digest that. A new baby, with siblings 8 and nearly 10 years older! And Mr. would be 75 when that child was 20... the maths was mind boggling. But hey - if that was our new reality, we were going to run with it! The kids certainly were excited about it, they're old enough to understand and yes, we told them; this is a family matter. I knew there was a chance this pregnancy wouldn't work out, but we felt they had a right t
Read more

2023: Our Year

-
Image
This is the yearly roundup post - as I've done almost every year for 2022 ,  2021 ,  2020 ,  2019 ,  2018 ,  2017 , 2016 seems to be skipped as I got to grips with mothering two little ones, and  2015 . 2023 was, for us, a year of highlights and milestones as well as getting on with life and growing.  Milestones This year, Mr. and I were married for the third (!) time, almost exactly ten years after we first tied the knot. Some of the background (and lots more pictures) about this is here  - in short, our three weddings were firstly the Register Office legal wedding that only Mr.'s parents attended as witnesses; secondly the church wedding at City Church where we invited everyone, also in 2013; and now, finally, following the annulment of Mr's previous marriages, we made our marriage sacramental by having it convalidated in the Catholic Church. 2023 was also the year that saw N(9)'s First Holy Communion. A beautiful celebration of her now being old enough to understand
Read more