Celebrate Advent with Children

Somewhere in the middle of America there is a small family farm on which the farmer rises daily before the sun, feeding the animals, milking of the cows, and mending of the fences with the precision and familiarity of a well-made clock, just like his father and grandfather did before him. In a modest New England townhouse, a tired young woman with a new baby pulls out her aunt’s old china for Christmas dinner, because the festive pattern reminds her of the fabric of her family’s life that has, literally and figuratively, helped to set the table in the home she and her husband are building now.

We are formed by what we always do, and what we do consistently will define who we ultimately become – or who we become like. As a mother to three young children, I have found this to be nowhere more true than in the family, with that slightly inconvenient detail that the people our children are becoming most like is, well, us.

“We become our habits, and our kids become us. The family, for better or worse, is a formation machine,” Justin Whitmel Earley writes in Habits of the Household. And so, what forms the family matters deeply. Like the soldier, farmer, athlete, or musician, we are defined by our disciplines.

Our rector often reminds the parents of our parish that “more is caught than taught,” which is part warning over the way children imitate their parents and the atmosphere created in the home, but I think mostly encouragement that it’s not actually all up to us.

This was proven true on a recent solo parenting night during a work trip for my husband, as I trudged up the stairs, my children’s wayward water bottles in hand, to find my eldest two reenacting an entire seventeen-minute-long church service – complete with baptisms and communion (“the body of Christ, the bread of … goodness” – they nearly nailed it!).

For seventeen minutes I basked in the beauty of what they had absorbed by our simply showing up, by immersing our family in an environment echoing with the voices of fellow pilgrims past and present. I crouched there, truly astonished at all they’d “caught” during corporate worship all the times I was sure they were missing it as they fidgeted in their seats and asked for snacks and fought over the green crayon.

There are many days that I feel ill-equipped for the task of building a Christian home and raising faithful children. And I’m keenly aware that parenting, like all God-ordained endeavors, is important, holy work and it is right and good to feel the weight of it – but it shouldn’t crush us. We can be buoyed, parented ourselves, even, by our communities, who in turn are bolstered by generations who have come before.

I grew up in an Episcopal church, lukewarm to the faith until I was confirmed as an Anglican in the ACNA as a young adult. I had always enjoyed a casual familiarity with liturgy: the sacraments, the structure and elements of worship, the lectionary, the daily rhythms of prayer, the church calendar with its holy days and seasons set apart for feasting and fasting, and various other traditions – plainly speaking, the things we as Christians collectively always do and which the great cloud of witnesses who have gone before us have also done. But it wasn’t until I found myself struggling to piece together a meaningful and spiritually rich home for my young family that those once rote liturgical bits and pieces turned technicolor, sweeping my heart up into the reality of a supernatural inheritance beyond what I could ever ask or imagine.

In Sacred Seasons: A Family Guide to Center Your Year around Jesus, a beautiful guidebook for young families on the history and rhythms of liturgical living, Danielle Hitchen gives this description of liturgy:

Christian liturgy is drawn from Israel’s past, reinterpreted in light of the resurrection, and enacted with an orientation toward our future hope. Christian liturgical structures are continually rehearsing the work God has already done, reminding us of the power of Christ within us, and pointing us to the day when God will finally make all things new.

Yet all this feels a far cry from what one might find with a quick scroll of social media for a mom blog at the start of the Advent season, where we find ourselves today. It doesn’t take but a minute of wading through snowman crafts, Elf on the Shelf hiding place ideas, Christmas cookie recipes, Target decor, and debates around good old Saint Nick and his existence/importance/role within the Christian family to find oneself reeling from decision fatigue while in hot pursuit of a twinkling, meaning-filled season that will elicit awe and wonder from starry-eyed children, dreamily clad in matching plaid pajamas.

We all know that what’s billed as a “super simple craft” will likely involve thirty minutes of prep in exchange for two minutes of engagement, sure to end in tears on someone’s end, and that the kind of preparation that leads to an exasperated, exhausted parent is hardly the kind of preparation that clears heart and home in anticipation of the coming Infant King.

While mostly well-intentioned and meant to make holidays special for children (for whom almost everything moderately out of the ordinary already is special), navigating a Pinterest-perfect sea of celebratory options is overwhelming, especially with an eye to the ultimate purpose of orienting hearts toward Christ. I found that our family needed something more. Something time-tested and sturdy. Something that had made it, however battle-worn, through the centuries, wars, upheavals, revolutions, technological advancements, and cultural movements that stood between the very first Christian families and our own. I wanted to create memories around those holy days most central to our faith, to cultivate daily rhythms that would point them to their Creator.

Photograph by Halfpoint / Adobe Stock.

So, through learning from our church family in our small Anglican parish, reading, researching, and even a little bit of scrolling, I began to learn more about the roots of Anglicanism and other liturgical faith traditions. Slowly our family began patterning our days and weeks and lives after the life of Christ, praying the Daily Office and embracing the rich traditions that have punctuated the church calendar for centuries. And there among the candles and collects, the lectionary readings and changing colors of the seasons – purple, white, green, red, black – I found a firm foundation on which to build my own little family’s culture.

What does that look like, practically speaking?

Well, this Advent season, for example, we will make an Advent wreath to be placed in the middle of our dining table, weekly lighting the candles of hope, peace, joy (the sole pink candle and my daughter’s favorite), and love, followed by the central white Christ candle on Christmas Eve. We’ll open tiny scrolls of paper tucked into our Advent calendar each day and follow their instructions: to observe an old church tradition, read scripture, or engage in a simple act of service or kindness. We’ll set up our nativity scene and try to add only one character or animal at a time as we anticipate Emmanuel. We’ll move our wise men around the house as they make their way to baby Jesus. All the pieces will end up in different rooms and not at all where they are supposed to be, and that will be OK! We’ll gather at night for family prayer from The Book of Common Prayer and we’ll read our Advent devotional and a fun Christmasy book together. On the evening of December 5 my kids will put out their empty shoes, awaking to find them filled with gold chocolate coins, an orange, and a small trinket in the morning as we remember the quiet charity of that legendary Bishop of Myra. On December 13, I’ll attempt to put battery-powered candles on my eldest’s head as we study the steadfastness of Saint Lucia. We will see how this goes. We may even finally get to preparing the feast of the seven fishes on Christmas Eve, a nod to my husband’s Italian heritage – but only if shellfish count as fish, of course.

There will be songs and friends and church services and feast days, baking and gift-buying and special meals. It will probably feel too busy, and not exactly how I’d hoped, but of one thing I can be completely sure: because we have chosen to live liturgically and embrace the traditions of the church, I won’t have to pull the memory-making magic out of a hat.

“The innovative, restorative work of culture-making needs to be primed by those liturgical traditions that orient our imagination to the kingdom come,” writes James K. A. Smith in You Are What You Love. “In order to foster a Christian imagination, we don’t need to invent, we need to remember.”

In a world that screams “innovate at all costs,” the great tradition of the church helps us remember that we are not here to create the next best thing, but rather to order our lives around the life of our very good King.

And though incorporating ancient practices that are new to us may feel awkward at first, what we do in our homes when our kids are very little becomes their normal. It is all they know, and it is good. And fun! For all the spiritual disciplines and fasting, in an earnest attempt to follow the Church calendar we find plenty of opportunities for a party, celebration, special recipe, or fun activity to surprise and delight children. The abundant life, there for the taking.

Like many parents, the vision that my husband and I hold for our young family includes beautiful memories made, special days marked by fun and meaningful traditions, and a faith-filled legacy that will last for generations.

In their book Theology of Home, Noelle Mering and Carrie Gress put it this way: “Families who are conscientious about legacy tend to prize ceremony, tradition, family, and togetherness…. All of these desires – for eternity and communion, and for the signs and symbols which point to them – direct us quietly not just to these good things but also to sacramental life.”

To live this way is to live simultaneously set apart and centered in belonging – calls of the Christian life we find in 1 Peter 1:15–16, Ephesians 2:19, and elsewhere throughout scripture. For those of us who sometimes feel as though we are fumbling in the dark as we scramble to build homes that point heavenward, in turning to the traditions of the ancient church we meet saints on whose shoulders we find a solid place to stand – a grace that is ecumenical in nature and accessible to families across Christian denominations.

Living liturgically grafts us into God’s family culture. It reminds even the parents who are doing this for the first time that they, too, have a beautiful inheritance, complete with all those wonder-filled, foundational things Christians do and have always done.