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?
Comments
8 responses to “Advent Calendars and Jesse Trees”
I have never heard of the tradition of a Jesse tree. Interesting. I would have thought I had an inkling of a lot of christian based Christmas traditions having som many pastors, cantors and church related personal in the family. I will read up on it. Thank you for introducing this to me.
That said, this year was actually the very first one in my 42 years that I didn’t have an advent calendar. I used to get one. from my mom but since she was at rehab this year she kinda forgot and so did we. It is strange when a tradition is fading. We’ll see if it was a hiccup and continues next year or if it is the end of an era.
When we were much younger we used to have “Adventsstündchen” – little advent hour. Which meant we gathered around a table, lighted a candle and usually did some crafts (often being gifts or things my mom needed to prepare for her work as a Catechist), we sang songs, my mom played the flute and we worked on our Christmas play. Another tradition we had for many many years and I wrote about here: https://www.craftaliciousme.com/best-traditions-i-grew-up-with/
AS we are celebrating Christmas on Christmas Eve and I will be putting up the tree today I am allowed to say Merry Christmas already. May you have blessed holidays.
Thanks so much for posting this! I have heard of Jesse trees before, but didn’t know how they worked. What fun and meaningful traditions to do each year. I also loved how you posted a time-lapse of sort. The days can be long but the years sure are short!
This is so fun! I love the Jesse tree and sock advent calendar. I will have to try to do one of those next year. We have an advent calendar – it’s a little house shaped thing with drawers for each of the days leading up to Christmas. This year we just put 4 m&ms in for each of the boys. Some years there was a slip every few days that said ‘pick a present’ and they got to unwrap a little toy car or a Christmas book. I would like to try something faith-based next year!
Oh, my. That seems like a lot of work! I just bought a puzzle advent calendar this week and I hope we can reuse for many years to come because it was a lot of fun.
When we first got married, we had a tiny apartment and no where to display holiday cards, so I started putting a ribbon around a doorway and using clothespins to put up the cards. We are still doing this – we even use the same ribbon. That’s probably our longest lasting holiday tradition/decoration. It looks pretty empty at the beginning of the month and then by December 18 or 19, it’s full and lovely!
That is a great tradition, and so easy.
Traditions we had outgrown? None yet. Advent calendar?… We don’t own one. We had two last year, one for L and one for R, hers was beads, and his was cars and oh my gosh, at the end we ended up with so many beads, and so many cars…
I think if I ever do one again, it will have to be an edible one, say chocolates or something.
Edible is the way to go I think