My sister Abby Tardiff is once again providing a template for advent chains.
1. Go to this link on Dropbox and print out all six pages. Cut along the lines so you have strips.
2. If you want to be fancy, you can paste the strips to colored paper — purple for the first, second, and fourth weeks, and pink for the third. If you don’t want to get fancy, just use them as is, or let the kids color the pictures in. Make a paper chain and hang it in a prominent place.
3. Each day of Advent, starting tomorrow, December 1, you cut snip chain and read the appropriate verse inside. This is a nice visual activity for kids, because they can see the chain getting shorter and shorter as you approach Christmas day. Some people draw out the lesson that the chains of sin grow weaker and weaker as the Savior draws near. One year, I gussied up a few of the links with a hint to where the kids could find some kind of treat (chocolate in the mailbox, that kind of thing).
That’s it! Thanks, Abby.
Then we put everything in a box, and when Advent comes, we take turns reading that day’s reading, and whoever made the day’s ornament gets to hang it up. One year, I cut a branch off an evergreen tree and stuck it in a pot full of rocks in the living room. One year, we hung the the ornaments from the ceiling in a line, leading up to where the Christmas tree would be. One year, very short on room, I cut a bare tree branch and bolted that to the wall. It has that gloriously weird, almost-festive Catholic look that unmistakably says, “SOMETHING is going on, but it ain’t Christmas yet!”