Our New Advent Tradition

Advent is a special season of the year and we are enjoying each day of expectation and waiting for Christmas. Right now this is one of Preston's highlights of the day: After we finish cleaning up from dinner we head up to our living room and together light the advent candles. In the corner of the room opposite our Christmas tree we have our advent branch. Every day we tell a different story from the Bible as we move chronologically from the creation of the world to the birth of Christ. Jamie has creatively made a series of ornaments that symbolize each of these stories. We review the previous stories with Preston and listen to him retell as much as he can from the earlier stories, then add a new story and place its ornament on the branch. Besides being great fun for all three of us, it is a good way to practice our storytelling and we are seeing some of the principles we have learned about oral communicators lived out in Preston. He learns so much through repetition and other memory devices, and the symbols on the ornaments take him right into each of the stories.