Here's our December Book List for Christmas and Advent
Growing up we lit candles and said Advent prayers at dinner time. I think once or twice my mom mentioned giving up something for Advent, but I remember objecting saying, "Who started that Advent tradition?" lol I was probably thinking about Christmas cookies. Anyway, no one I knew did anything except Advent candles. No mention of Jesse tree, O Antiphons, or sacrifice beads, and giving something up. It just wasn't part of the culture here. If they did they sure didn't talk about it.
Growing up we lit candles and said Advent prayers at dinner time. I think once or twice my mom mentioned giving up something for Advent, but I remember objecting saying, "Who started that Advent tradition?" lol I was probably thinking about Christmas cookies. Anyway, no one I knew did anything except Advent candles. No mention of Jesse tree, O Antiphons, or sacrifice beads, and giving something up. It just wasn't part of the culture here. If they did they sure didn't talk about it.
SOO...now I have had doors opened to me with all sorts of cool ideas and traditions. One being the Jesse Tree. I had no idea what I was doing last year when we started it with Holy Heroes. I could not find a thing on Pinterest about simple home made Jesse Trees either- Go figure. So I made this construction paper tree from the kids hands in one evening. I will be changing it over to felt, using this as my pattern now.
My mom was over we traced and cut the kids hands out, I think mine are the bottom row. I actually labeled the kids hands, and I remember using mine somewhere. I glue dotted it together, done in about 20 mins or so. She started them on their first ornament and the evening went on smooth as we listened to Holy Heroes. So here ya go, a cheap and easy Jesse Tree to go along with your paper ornaments, just add pipe cleaners.
Our 2012 Jesse Tree. I have such good memories.
We also found TONS of links to free Jesse Tree printable ornaments- Holy Heroes has them this year. So each night we colored and cut out ornaments, did a coloring page and short bible verse. Just google printable Jesse Tree ornaments, if you want links, message me or leave a comment, and I will go add the links, seriously, there are so many though. We dedicated at least an hour to our Jesse Tree each night, and we opened our Holy Heroes emails that evening to watch videos (getting the emails was exciting because it was daily- I still didn't buy the cd this year because of the excitement in asking mom if the email was there yet) pray and sing a song and color a coloring page. It was awesome. The kids, 4 and barely 3, never once or grew tired. So we made paper ornaments and used pipe cleaners to hang them. We made extra ornaments because some we couldn't decide what we should color. We did coloring pages for each day too. If they were tired of coloring than we cut out and pasted ornaments.
This year we have the advantage of knowing a little Latin- to go with some of the O Antiphons, we traded ornaments in a Jesse Tree ornament swap and we have a new Advent book and some incense to burn and will have a felt hand tree. I am sticking with the hand print tree. I am partial to it now. Plus it happens to fit nicely on my foyer's mirror. We also bought incense, Frankincense and Myrrh. You can buy a complete set of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh at Holy Heroes too fyi. Or check your local Catholic book store,it runs around $2- $3 a jar. I am trying to find us a pretty brass incense burner. We are looking forward to burning our incense!
O Antiphon time.. start teaching your kids Veni Veni Emmanuel. Or O Come, O Come Emmanuel. This is your O Antiphon song. If you start learning it now, you will have it ready in time for Advent. Try the Latin...what can it hurt? ;) That is the link to a youtube video we play to learn. Hope it helps!
Moving on.
The Advent book, I found at a used book store here in town for $9. I love the fold out pictures. Take a look. It's very thick by the way, well made. Has a pretty red ribbon. It sort of reminds me of an Advent Calender on a large book scale.
each page has a beautiful door to open
Simeon is last
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