First Sunday in Advent

I love Advent! This is our third year observing this season leading up to Christmas. Yes, I've shamelessly borrowed this from the rest of Christianity, but I don't care. It's a wonderful way to focus on the Savior and to count down to Christmas.

Tonight we lit the first candle on our Advent wreath. Prior to doing so, we sang "The Nativity Song" from the Children's Songbook. I love the first verse: "This is the season beloved of the year. Sing a rhyme; Christmastime soon will be here." Such a perfect sentiment! We had to light the candle twice so each child could have a turn. Actually, we lit it four times, because after the second time, Sariah blew it out. The third time, it blew out all on its own for some reason. Next Sunday we'll light two candles, three candles the next, four candles the Sunday before Christmas, and then we'll add the center white candle on Christmas Eve.

After lighting the candle, we read Isaiah 11:1-2, "And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots: And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord." These verses, which prophesy of Christ and tell of his descending from Jesse, begin our Advent celebration and introduce our other tradition, the Jesse Tree. It's basically a small Christmas tree or, sometimes, a bare branch. Each day during Advent, we read scripture stories from the Old Testament and Book of Mormon leading up to the birth of Jesus. We begin with the creation of the world and Adam and Eve. We cover many of the main characters throughout history, the prophets who taught and prophesied of the Messiah's coming. The last five days or so, we read about the events immediately preceding Christ's birth, ending on Christmas Morning. Each story comes along with a corresponding ornament which is hung on the tree on that particular day.

After the Jesse Tree ornament was hung, we sang "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear", which I selected because of the third verse: "For lo! The days are hastening on, By prophets seen of old, When with the evercircling years Shall come the time foretold..." You see, the purpose of Advent is two-fold. It is a way to count down to Christmas and to commemorate the time of waiting for the Savior's birth. But it also symbolizes our own wait for the Savior to return at His Second Coming.

Advent, I'm learning, is a time of quietness and introspection. It's a challenge, but I'm hoping to create some of that for our family. After we sang the hymn and extinguished the candle, I put on soft Christmas music and insisted that the children sit down near the tree and listen while I read stories. It had been a particularly rough day, between hauling Sariah out of Sacrament meeting three times and trying to make dinner while both kids were racing around in fits of hyper-ness, jumping off couches and down the stairs, screaming like banshees the entire time.

Every morning we will read from the scriptures and hang our ornament. Every evening, I hope to gather Dallin and Sariah around for Christmas story time. I have a few other special times that I hope to carve out of our days as well, but I'll save those for another post. As for myself, I hope to listen to my favorite sacred Christmas music on a daily basis, and to spend some time in focused scripture study over the next four weeks.