Nicheless before Advent

So my little corner of the internet (mine! - see the flag?) isn't going to become a multimedia empire.  As if my name didn't give that away already.  You see, I have no niche.  I care about too many things, and none of them enough.

I care about Advent.  It starts in a few days.  The stores have had Christmas going on for a week or so now; some radio stations went to entirely Christmas music in mid-November.  They honestly don't know that Christmas doesn't start for almost a month.  They also don't know that it lasts for twelve days (though they play that song, entirely missing the point).  Being Catholic is the best: we get feasts that go on for over a week.  But even my mom has the Christmas music going already; I can only hope my kids don't ever pick up this habit.

We're doing our best to make Advent a season of preparation, but in the right way, preparing our hearts.  We should be doing that all year, of course, but twice a year we get a chance to really focus on it, because I tend to forget sometimes and get sidetracked with this world.  I don't think we're going to do a Jesse Tree this year, though we did last year.  We read Jotham's Journey last year, so this year we're going to read Bartholomew's Passage.    When the kids were smaller, we really enjoyed The Advent Storybook.

I like the idea of the Playmobil or Lego Advent calendars, but they're always for the wrong number of days, and they're really expensive.  So I bought a Playmobil winter set and broke it up into a bunch of envelopes, to give the kids a few pieces every day.  It works out nicely that each Sunday they'll get a building, and the other days they'll get something smaller.  I also have a book for them each day (not new, just from our Christmas stash), and a movie for some days.  We do have an Advent calendar, sent by a relative in France, where they actually do know how many days there should be (it almost never starts December 1st), so we'll open a tab on that each day and try to decipher the French words based on our limited Latin studies.

We're going to make our own Advent candles this year from a beeswax candle kit.  They'll go on the wreath on our home altar, and I need to dig out the purple altar cloth.  I need to get out a devotional booklet too - probably one for the kids and one for me. We need to get back into the daily Mass habit, and this is a good time to do it.  The new liturgical year starts on Sunday, in case you're keeping track.