Last week, Elisabeth took us on a tour of her Christmas decorations (which are gorgeous, by the way), and I commented that this year, I only have the tree and a nativity scene. We used to have a sock advent calendar and a Jesse Tree when the kids were smaller, though, and Elisabeth was keen for more details, so here they are.

We begin our story back in 2008. I was looking for something faith-based to do with the kids (aged 9, 7 and 5) over Christmas and came across the idea of a Jesse Tree. Each day in December, we read a story or passage from the bible and hung an ornament on our Jesse Tree to represent the story. My trees were always a bunch of sticks from the garden put into some kind of container. For the ornaments, I picked ones out of our normal stash or made them, which, in most cases, was just printing a picture out and threading a string through, so nothing too demanding. The kids would take turns doing the readings.

In 2011, we switched to using Jesse Tree readings by Ann Voskamp. It was a downloadable PDF with printable matching ornaments.

In our second year doing the Jesse Tree, I came up with the idea of making an Advent Calendar using little socks. Inside each sock, we put the daily reading, ornament, and a lolly for each of us. The socks were all pegged to a cord to form a garland. I used a glue gun to stick felt stars on the pegs and wrote the numbers on the pegs. After dinner each night, we pulled the day’s sock down, read the reading, hung the ornament and ate our lolly. The sock Advent followed us through three houses, even once our evening activities crowded out the Jesse Tree tradition.

With the girls now living out of home and E rarely here in the evenings anyway, 2021 was the last time the sock Advent appeared. The socks all went to the Opshop last Christmas, from where I hope they had another life, bringing all the festive feels to some local toddlers.

Are there Christmas traditions your family has outgrown? Do you have an Advent calendar?