Advent at Home with
Children and Young People

Advent begins 4 Sundays before Christmas day. It is a time for waiting and hoping and preparing for the coming of Christ. Advent means coming.

Below are a few suggestions for observing Advent at home with children and young people. Many of them will be very familiar, but I've put them together in the hope that some things might be of use!

Rev'd Rosie Hewitt, Children's and Youth Minister

Advent Calendars

Advent Calendars help us count the days. I think the picture ones especially – with their little glimpses into other worlds behind each door – speak of the wonder and mystery of what is coming.

I had a go at making an Advent calendar this year. It was fairly time-consuming but quite fun! It’s a project for older children and teenagers really, as it needs a craft-knife... I stuck a picture from an old calendar onto a rectangle cut from a cereal packet, then cut 24 doors into that using a craft-knife. I then laid that over a piece of ordinary card so I could mark in pencil where the doors were, then I cut out little pictures from old Christmas cards and stuck them onto the ordinary card where the pencil marks were. Then I just had to stick the bit with the doors in it to the bit with the pictures on, and it was finished. (Pritt-stick seemed to work well for all the gluing. I think PVA might have made everything a bit wrinkly...)

An Advent Wreath

We like to having an Advent wreath in our house, with candles to light each day. For a few years, we made a salt-dough spiral with as many candle holes in as were needed for the days of Advent that year. (Because Advent always starts on a Sunday, the number of days in Advent is slightly different year-to-year.) You can find instructions about how to make one here. It’s quite quick and easy.

This year, I have bought 3 purple candles, one pink one, and one white one, to be arranged in candle-holders with the coloured candles in a ring on the outside and the white one in the middle. I’ll put some evergreen foliage around them, and each day at a mealtime we’ll light as many candles as we’ve had Sundays in Advent. The white one is for lighting on Christmas day, and the pink one is for the third Sunday in Advent, called Gaudete Sunday (Gaudete means ‘Rejoice!’). The purple ones are for the other Sundays, because purple is the colour for Advent. I found my set of candles here.

With my young children, we say a very short Advent prayer as we light our candle(s): ‘Come quickly, baby Jesus!’ You might like to use the more traditional, ‘Come quickly, Lord Jesus’!

A Jesse Tree

Many churches in this country used to have Jesse Trees – depictions of Jesus’ family tree in stone or wood or stained glass. Not very many survived the destruction of images in the seventeenth century, but there are some that remain. More recently, an Advent tradition has emerged of creating a Jesse tree at home. The way we do it in our house is to find a twiggy branch and put it in a vase or jug with some sand or mud or stones at the bottom to hold it steady. We have a decoration for each person in the Jesse Tree; each day of Advent, when we light our Advent wreath, we hang the decoration on the tree and read the story of that person from our children’s Bible.

Because I like to while away hours I haven’t really got making things (!), I made our Jesse Tree decorations. (They’re made of felt. For each one, I cut out two felt circles, stuck them together with PVA, sandwiching wool in between to make a hanging loop, then cut out and stuck on smaller felt shapes to depict whatever the decoration needed to feature.) Pre-made Jesse Tree decorations are not very easy to buy, but you can download printable decorations here (either pre-coloured or left for children to colour in) here and here (to be coloured in), or buy card ones to be coloured in here.

There’s a very lovely book by Geraldine McCaughrean called The Jesse Tree, which has retellings of the Bible stories that go with each person in the Tree. You could use them instead of reading the stories from a children’s Bible. (You can get a second-hand copy of the book quite cheaply from World of Books. With older children, you might like to read from an ordinary Bible. You can find suggested passages here, along with the symbols for each person on the tree.

The Christmas Mystery by Jostein Gaarder

This is a really, really wonderful children’s chapter book. It has a chapter to be read each day of Advent. We read it as a family when I was growing up, and I’m planning to read it to my children this year for the first time. It’s a mystery about an Advent calendar, combined with a journey over land and through time to the first Christmas. I highly recommend it as a way of observing Advent together. It’s more than rich enough to be read year after year.

When to decorate...

Traditionally, Christmas decorations – including Christmas trees – were not put up until Christmas eve. That's because Advent is a time for preparation and expectation, and the time for celebration is really the twelve days of Christmas – from Christmas day until Epiphany. But we don’t manage to wait until Christmas Eve to decorate the Christmas tree and put out the nativity scene in our family! We do try and wait a little though – aiming for the middle of December rather than the beginning of it.

Nativity Scene

We were given a lovely olive wood nativity scene that we put up each year, but we've also got a second-hand Playmobil one. The Playmobil one is great because it’s robust enough to be played with freely, and every year both children spend a lot of time with it. I remember a delightful moment with my older one a few years ago when he told me solemnly what was in Melchior’s box (‘his computer’!), and a very happy trip to the Co-op with the same child clutching Mary all the way round. As well as second-hand Playmobil ones, you can buy chunky wooden nativity figures from Lanka Kade, which are Fairtrade and would stand up well to being played with.

With our olive wood nativity set, we wait to add the baby Jesus to it until the night of Christmas eve. And the kings get gradually closer to the stable, arriving at last on 6th January (Epiphany).