Advents

Jingle Bell is back for another season, because before we knew it, today became the first day of December, and here we are counting down with advent calendars and visits from our favorite elf.  The object that rests beneath the Star Wars tree here is actually an advent calendar, one that counts down the days until Christmas with small gifts for each day.  Behind each door is a LEGO mini-kit, a figure or something from the movies that Madison can snap together each and every day.  By Christmas Eve, we'll have all sorts of new and painful things to step on in the dark!

Actually, she's pretty good about putting LEGO pieces back where they belong.  The first piece she got today was a landspeeder, which was easy to put together.  Meanwhile, the other advent calendars are downstairs, these filled with chocolate gifts for every day of the month.  Nana makes sure we have these, so everyone gets a bit of chocolate each morning.  Because that's a perfectly healthy choice, right?

We had heavy rain today, and cold weather too.  It was a fairly miserable Saturday, which I'm sure put a damper on a lot of the festivities out there.  We were considering going here or there to see lights or enjoy celebrations, but I do think that some of them have been canceled or postponed until tomorrow, and the others that aren't won't be terribly fun.  It's just not the best weather for us to go outside in.

So we stayed inside.  Mommy made another wonderful breakfast on the skillet, and we had the Christmas music playing.   Madison did some piano practice, and did some artwork as well.  She's designing our Christmas card for this year, and did a bit of that today.  We'll share the end result when finished, of course.

Daddy was making an advent calendar of a different sort today, one that will be handed out at KidPak tomorrow morning.  It's one that tells the story of Jesus, but along the way it gives the kids an opportunity to show a "random act of kindness" each day.

Mommy spotted the idea online, so this morning we sent a bit of time working on this, coming up with ideas here or there, and making it work out.  It should be a nice thing to hand out tomorrow.

In the spirit of advent calendars and counting things down, we read chapter one of the book of Luke tonight.  There are twenty-four chapters in the book of Luke, one for each day leading up to Christmas Eve, so we thought it would be a great idea to go through each one each evening.  And we're doing this along with reading from the "A Christmas Carol" devotional Daddy wrote last year, and another chapter in the Nutcracker book, which is actually showing a lot of backstory to the movie, with some information that probably would have been helpful for the movie, but that's okay.  We're enjoying the book quite a bit.

We watched "A Muppet Christmas Carol" tonight, along with one of our favorite old episodes of the Shirley Temple show, one with "Babes in Toyland," featuring Jonathan Winters and Jerry Colonna.  We love, love, love watching these old shows of live television broadcasts.  There's so much more energy.

Everyone went to bed a little earlier tonight, ready for a new day tomorrow.  December is here, and it's going to be pretty awesome.