Thanksgivukah Advent-ures: How to Celebrate the "Season" before You Celebrate Christmas - Guest Post

Resident Thealogian Kate Allen who can be found at Life, Love, Liturgy, preps for the holidays in amazing ways. (as always).

If you're like me, you're just not ready for the red and green and tinsel cropping up at Target, Starbucks, and the grocery store.  I want to go, "Hey, don'tcha know there's all kinds of cool stuff that goes on for a couple of months before Christmas ever arrives?"

I invite you to try out the following this year, not to ditch your family traditions, but to expand them.

Thanksgiving/Chanukah: This year, for the first time (and the last time for 77,000 years, according to one source, Thanksgiving and the first day of Chanukah coincide.  This year, as you finalize your Thanksgiving day menu, consider a few Jewish specialties, like latkes 

Courtesy: All Recipes

or matzo ball soup.

Courtesy: Food Network

(Pro-tip: matzo ball soup can be made in minutes using a handy-dandy pre-made dry mix in the Jewish section of your grocery store.)  When you and your family and friends are gathered around the Thanksgiving dinner table, share the story of the miracle of Chanukah, in which an oil lamp with only enough oil for one night lasted eight nights, providing ongoing light in darkness.  Chanukah is an eight-day Jewish feast of enduring, miraculous light--telling this story is is a great time to light the first candle of eight of your menorah, if you have one, or perhaps the first of other candles you have on your table.  Allow this to be your segue into a giving of thanks by each person around the table.

Then, when you awake the day after Thanksgiving, consider just staying home.  Really.  Eating latkes with cranberry sauce for breakfast while sipping home-brewed coffee and wearing fuzzy slippers is a far gentler holiday practice than trampling your neighbor at 3 a.m. to get through store doors.  Consider continuing your candle-lighting through the eight days of Chanukah, saying a silent prayer as you light them if you aren't familiar with the Hebrew prayers.

Next, Advent, as in, advent-ure!  

That's right--before you pull out your tubs of Christmas glitz, try cutting a few boughs from an evergreen (places that sell Christmas trees may give these away for free, if you don't have any evergreens of your own) and fashion an Advent wreath with your kids.

Courtesy: Happy Home Fairy

Each Sunday, beginning December 1, light one of the candles.  Sing a verse of "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" or "People Look East" with your kids. Invite them into conversation about what the dawning of light means.  Refer back to the Chanukah ritual, if you used it.  You might ask:

Why do we want light when it's dark?  

What are examples of darkness we experience?  

What are ways that we can bring light to dark places?  

Allow Advent to be the season of quiet, pregnant anticipation that it's intended to be--because if you do, the glimmer and dazzle of Christmas Eve's light and the bright clamor of Christmas morning will shine and ring out for you in a whole new way.

 

Toddler Tricks - 69: Don't Break Christmas

Problem: It's time to break out the holiday spirit, by which I mean decorations, but your young children will obviously break every single item that can be broken. And this will take just minutes, not weeks. Christmas is a dangerous holiday. Trust me, I know. Pine needles prick, glass bulbs shatter, and that creche your grandmother handed down to you that's been in the family for ages is missing the Baby Jesus. Dear God, why, Christmas, why?

Solution: Lots of them. First, fake tree. Seriously. No eyes being poked out is key this holiday season. No crying toddlers with needles sticking out of their curious palms is important to everyone's sanity. Second, and most importantly, plastic bulbs. Keep everything that is glass packed up. Seriously, don't even take them out. Don't do it. I know your hands are itching. I can just put this way up here, you think. Surely nothing will happen to it, and it's tradition. Fight the urge, it will only end in tears. Plastic everything. I know from experience. My first Christmas with the kids, I thought the few glass bulbs I had from family would be okay. Three shattered bulbs and two babies with (thankfully) no cuts or glass swallowed later, I took them off. Don't be like me. You can even use string instead of hooks if you're super worried. I just used the hooks. They're covered in that green rubbery stuff these days, so I figure they're safe enough for three year olds. If yours are two, you might want to consider string.

Now, have the kids help. Have them hang up some of the safest ornaments while you go through and baby check everything else. Of course, at the end of that phase, the tree will look like this:

But you can easily rehang. By the end, you'll have a good-looking tree that's toddler safe. And don't worry. You'll get your Christmas back. Just wait a few years.

Of course, the next morning, my kids woke me up utterly ticked that there were no presents under there, even though I thought I thoroughly explained it to them last night. Be prepared for a few days of that, too.