Somehow, the beginning of December has sneaked up on me (again) and I have had the frantic searching in the attic for the much loved Playmobil advent calendars and the baby socks calendar that I made just before the birth of the Littlest.  I managed to fill most of the baby socks with chocolate treats (but hadn’t bought quite enough to fill them all; 4 x 25 = 100, which is quite a lot of chocolate coins!).  The Tribe had the right amount of oohs and ahhhs when they saw the filled socks at breakfast on 1st December.  I love the fact that even the Eldest gets excited by these little things.  The Playmobil advent calendars were a different matter however and yesterday evening just before I read the Littlest her bedtime story, I was still putting the right box on the right number.  Maybe I’ll learn one year to do a bit of advance planning, but I’m sure that I’m not alone with this last minute flurry of activity.

So, we have plenty of Advent calendars in our home now, but one of the Tribe asked “what exactly is Advent?”  A good question.  I guess the most simple explanation is that it’s the beginning  of the countdown to Christmas.  Looking a little bit further into its meaning, the word ‘advent’ comes from the Latin word ‘advent’ meaning ‘coming’, so in the Christian faith it represents the first coming of Jesus – his birth in Bethlehem.  As Lent is the preparation for Easter so Advent is the preparation for Christmas in the Christian church.

Over the years we have collected quite a few Christmas books including the nativity story told in simple pictures – the Littlest loves this and already understands that it is fundamentally a celebration of the birth of ‘baby Jesus’.  I hope that they will all continue to remember this in our increasingly consumer driven world – it’s easy to forget at this time of year, particularly after the craziness of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.  How crazy was all that?

At the beginning of Advent I also start to read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to the Tribe.  This started several years ago just after we’d taken them to the cinema to see the brilliant animation of the book.  I finish reading it on Christmas Eve – sometimes it gets a little crazy as evenings are missed and a couple of times it has ended with a  marathon read by Father of the Tribe and me.  Dickens’ words are beautiful but it can be quite difficult to read aloud for any length of time!  It is a great book to read, even at a young age, as it does make the Tribe reflect on those less fortunate and also about how their actions can affect others in both good and bad ways.

The lead up to Christmas has begun and I hope that this year we will all try to be just a little bit kinder and more thoughtful over the next few weeks.  You never know, it might just stick.