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Advent 2011

Thanksgiving is over, the turkey has been eaten, the tree and lights are up, and the house is mostly decorated.  We had a wonderfully big Thanksgiving with my husband's family.  We are so thankful to live close to them and celebrate with them!


Making a Gingerbread House with cousins for one of their birthday parties.

More birthday party fun - pinata!

Button with his great-grandma at 92!

Thanksgiving meal

Four of the Hagelberg boys


And now, Advent is already upon us!  Today is the first Sunday of Advent, and we are doing our Advent wreath again this year.  Last year, we used our church's handout for our family's time, but this year, I was surprised by how many wonderful and free devotional resources you can find online that can help you with preparing for Christmas.  Here are a few that I found (all are free!):


We will be using probably a combination of a few of the above.  As the boys get older, I'm looking forward to using some of the more advanced resources.


Books
Christmas also means that we get to pull out some of our special books.  Here are some of the books that we'll be reading this season.  This may seem like a lot, but my boys LOVE to read.  There are also a number of Christmas stories and poems in My Book House Vol. 2 that we've been enjoying.

UPDATE (11/29/11): After picking up a few of the books above from the library, we decided to remove some of the holiday books from our reading list.  An Orange for Frankie by Patricia Polacco and The Story of Holly and Ivy by Rumer Godden are both extremely long picture books.  Buddy could probably handle them if I had the time to read to him uninterrupted, but Button doesn't have that sort of attention span at 2 years old.  Also, we took out Madeline's Christmas by Ludwig Bemelmans.  The boys have been on a Madeline kick lately, but this particular book isn't very good.  It's really all about a magician and barely talks about Christmas at all.  I really cannot recommend it.  I did, however, find a book called The Nativity illustrated by Ruth Sanderson with beautiful artwork.  The words in the book are directly from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

Songs and Hymns
One of my favorite parts about Christmas is the songs.  As we think about Advent, we will also be celebrating some old hymns.  Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus and O Come, O Come Emmanuel are a couple of my favorites as they look forward to the birth of Christ.  We will also be memorizing Luke 2:11.

Advent Calendar
We also will be doing our muffin tin advent calendar like we did last year with fun things to each day throughout the month of December.  But as this post is already super long, it will be a post for another day.




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