Jotham's Journey

Growing up my church never celebrated advent. It was just not something we did. In fact I never even knew there was a thing called advent until I was in college and the church I went to there celebrated it. For those out there who don't know, advent is the preparation season of the church to ready our hearts to celebrate Jesus' birth. It takes place the 4 weeks before Christmas. Most churches that celebrate will have candles each week at church, progressively lighting one more each week until all four are lit and on Christmas morning a fifth candle is lit. Each candle represents some aspect of Christmas but you all can look that part up if you are curious.

My point to all this is that this year we are doing something at home for advent. Joanna let me borrow a book that is a progressive story to tell the Christmas story to kids. The book is called Jotham's Journey and it is extremely cute and somewhat suspenseful. There are 3 books in the series (Batholomew's Passage and Tabitha's Travels are the other two) and in theory you could rotate them each Christmas so you don't read the same story each and every year. Andrew is really enjoying the story. I think it is a bit over Zane's head and obviously Lucy and Gwen could care less. But it is fun to light our advent candles at night and read the story (at dinner seems to work the best so far) and talk about what the Bible tells us about the Messiah and his birth. This will be a tradition that we keep for sure!