Advent, the season of preparation for Jesus’ birth, is officially upon us. I’ve been wanting to do something special with the boys to celebrate advent, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do. Since we recently moved and downsized, we don’t have any of our Christmas decorations or usual Christmas activities with us. Plus, we’re going “home” to Seattle in 2 weeks so it’s hardly worth the effort or the expense of a full Christmas set-up at hour house here.

It seems like everyone I know went out and got their Christmas tree last weekend, so I decided that we needed a tree of our own. And that’s where I came up with the idea for our advent tree:

I basically put together all of the ideas that I had floating around in my head and this is what I came up with: a simple, Jesus-focused project that will get my kids thinking about the true meaning of Christmas every day.

I started by painting a large tree on the back of some wrapping paper (the only paper I had that was big enough for the size of tree I wanted to make).

Then I went online and printed off some color-your-own Christmas tree ornaments and cut them out. On each ornament I wrote three things: Read, Pray, Do. For the “Read” part of the ornament I wrote a scripture verse relating to Jesus’ birth or why He was born; “Pray” has someone or something for us to pray for that day; and “Do” is a project or act of service that we will do together on that day to share Jesus’ love with others (just Google or search Pinterest for “acts of kindness” to generate a good list of ideas).

Each day David will choose an ornament from the basket, decorate it, and hang it on our advent tree. Then we will complete the “Read, Pray, Do” items that are on the ornament.

By the end of advent (or, in our case, the first 2 weeks of advent!) we will have a beautifully decorated tree. More importantly, though, we will have learned more about God’s great Love sent to us. And that, of course, is the most beautiful thing of all.