The celebration of Advent is part of my Midwestern Lutheran heritage and I always loved going to Wednesday night Advent services and watching the candles being lit in the Advent wreath.
It's not a part of the Mormon celebration. In fact, it doesn't seem that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints celebrates Advent. I miss it deeply.
So...we'll be celebrating it in our home. We've been wanting a new approach to Advent for a while. At least the boy and I have. When the boy was a little boy we usually bought one of those paper/cardboard Advent calendars that had little chocolates in them. Not such a good choice for our dairy allergic big girl.
This year we're making an Advent calendar - sans chocolate.
I got the idea from another blogger, Limette, over at Rose Cottage.
We're making one out of felt and ribbon. I'm sewing up little felt envelopes and we'll be filling them with pieces of paper containing ideas for Advent activities.
So each day the kids will open another felt envelope to find an activity that we'll participate in. Some days will have outings - like going to the city parade or the lighting of the city Christmas tree. Other days will have craft activities - like making Christmas ornaments or snowflakes to decorate our windows. Still other days will have cooking projects - like making sugar cookies or candy.
So far we've gotten this much done:
1. Picked out the felt colors. We're going traditional with greens and reds. (mostly because I already had those colors in my crafting stash and didn't want to buy supplies for the calendar - you'll see this theme throughout the project).
2. Cut the felt into envelope sized pieces using my cutting mat, ruler, and rotary cutter.
3. Pinned the felt into envelope shapes to be hand sewn with embroidery floss using the blanket stitch.
I plan to use ribbon to string them together into a garland and I'll be using velcro to close the envelopes. To attach them to the ribbon we'll simply close the top of the envelope over the ribbon and hang them that way.
I'm still trying to decide if I'll have time to embroider a number (1 thru 25) on each envelope or not.
In Part II of Advent, adventus, waiting, preparing I'll update you with the sewn envelopes and maybe even the completed garland. ;)
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