Advent Resources

Advent Activities for Families and Kids: Updated for 2023

by Christine Sine

I love getting ready for the Advent season and am already planning our activities and decorations for the season so thought you might like to do so too.

Resources for Covid Advent and Christmas

Multicultural Resources

Think Outside the Box

In some ways I am a traditionalist when it comes to Advent celebrations. I love to set up our Advent wreath and decorate the Christmas tree. However I also like to get creative during the season and love to encourage others to do the same.

Create an Advent Wreath

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Advent Wreath

The most traditional project to prepare us for the new liturgical year is to create or acquire and advent wreath. An Advent wreath typically consists of greenery with four candles, three purple and one pink. Each candle has a specific meaning:

  1. Candle one (purple) represents hope. It is often called the prophets’ candle.
  2. Candle two (purple) represents peace. It is often called the angels’ candle.
  3. Candle three (pink) represents joy. It is often called the shepherds’ candle.
  4. Candle four (purple) represents love. It is often called the Bethlehem candle.

Many advent wreaths also include a Christ candle in the middle of the wreath.

To celebrate with an Advent wreath, you light a candle on each Sunday of Advent. The first Sunday, you light candle one; the second Sunday, you light candles one and two, etc. You can often find readings to go along with the candle lightings on the internet or at Christian bookstores. Or, find a Christmas book that represents the theme of the week and read it with your children.

There are lots of ways to make Advent wreaths. It is a fun craft to do with kids and adults alike and may establish a new family tradition for you.

Here are a few that I find useful:

  • Fairly traditional Advent wreath: It does require an electric drill, fine tooth saw and wire cutters so obviously not something to let your kids do on their own.
  • A Succulent Advent wreath for those of us who collect succulents, this is a great way to put them to good use over the Advent and Christmas season.
  • Make a wreath to hang on your doors or windows.
  • Simple Advent wreath made from an old coat hanger – great fun for all of the family.
  • Low cost eco-friendly wreath – again fun to make.
  • Or, perhaps a junk wheel wreath with mason jar tea light.
  • And I love this one for making, among other things, an Advent wreath with children’s hand prints. One of my friends used her own and her husband’s handprints for the wreath and gave it to give to her grandkids as an Advent gift. Alternatively, get the kids to make the wreath and gift it to the grandparents!
  • Go bird friendly with your Advent wreath and Advent decorations. We tried this a couple of  years ago. The gelatine suggested in most of these goes moldy if you leave it inside too long, however, we planned to try it again with lard which should be more durable and also nutritious for the birds, but have not yet managed to do that. 

Create an Advent or Winter Spiral

This is not a long standing Advent tradition but is associated with Waldorf schools in the United States. It has similarities to walking the labyrinth and I think is a wonderful tradition to consider establishing for your family.

  • This site has great instructions for making an Advent spiral complete with Mary on a donkey with salt dough.
  • Sparkle stories has another rather more ambitious outdoor winter spiral.
  • Mountain Hearth has the most ambitious of all – a beautiful Advent walk that, as they say, really sets the mood for a different sort of holiday season filled with more stillness, reverence, contemplation and beauty amongst the prevalent hustle and bustle of shopping, parties, and general busyness that surrounds us in November and December.
  • I love this Advent spiral design from Holland.
  • And this very creative and relatively simple homemade Advent spiral – A new way to mark time 

Create an Advent Garden

This is an idea that I came up with a couple of years ago when I was feeling a little bored by the traditional Advent wreath which we had used for the last 20 years. I am a keen gardener and decided to create my own mini garden specifically for Advent.

I filmed this short video to explain my process and the reasoning behind it. This was a very meaningful and fun way to celebrate the season. It has become an important Advent activity for me. This year, I will replenish the garden again, choose a word to focus on each week and move it to my office desk as a way to pause and meditate during the day. 

I continue to work on this concept and find new inspiration each year. I loved this one from 2015.

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In 2016, we were traveling so I did not make a garden. Then, in 2017, I started experimenting with a little more creativity.

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Here are some other advent gardens that I have put together over the years:

I also came across this very creative Advent calendar/garden idea that I might experiment with too.

Make Your Own Advent Calendar

Advent calendars always seem to represent the more commercial side of Christmas to me with cheap chocolates, wooden toys and glittery paper being the predominant images. However, this is a wonderful tradition and there are many ways in which we can make it meaningful for our families.

  • I love the suggestion from the post Celebrating Advent with Children to make an Advent calendar with matchboxes, placing slips of paper in each one with different activities to do each day. Some of these are simple fun games to play, others are ways to reach out with acts of kindness and still others are family activities that are fun to do together. 
  • Advent in a Jar is a simple but effective way to help children enter into the season of Advent. Make a prayer jar with your kids in November before Advent begins. Use strips of paper rather than wood so that you can fit 24 or more days of activities, scriptures and prayer points that lead up to Christmas into your jar. Pull one out each day as a way to focus your kids attention on the real meaning of Christmas.
  • Another possibility is this recycle bin Advent calendar. What a great way to introduce kids to the season and to the need to be more responsible. The combination of inward reflection and outward caring is wonderful.
  • Check out this site with traditions from around the world to create your own list of traditions to talk about with your kids. You could use matchboxes or just write the name of a country on pieces of paper, put them in a jar and pull one out each day and then talk about the traditions of that country. 
  • CAFOD: Just One world in the U.K. has some great Advent liturgies available as well as a downloadable Advent calendar for kids.
  • Susan Forshey put together this helpful Advent calendar Forty Days of Joy and Love, which is a great concept to use for your Advent calendar without investing in funky toys or more unnecessary chocolates.
  • And here is a really fun one to explore – The Hubble Telescope Advent calendar
  • Catholic Mom has downloadable instructions for an Advent chain which has some similarities to an Advent calendar, but is especially designed to encourage kids to think beyond themselves at Christmas.
  • That Artist Woman shares an Advent Calendar that is of Mary and baby Jesus with stars surrounding their picture.
  • Our store offers a FREE download of Advent in a Jar for your use this Advent

Explore Christmas traditions and recipes from around the world with your family

Buzzfeed life has a wonderful array of recipes associated with the Advent and Christmas season in many different parts of the world. Just reading through some of these has my mouth watering. Choose a few to make with your kids and create some special prayers for the countries the traditions come from at the same time.

I love to experiment with new recipes from different parts of the world especially for our Advent Open house.

Set up a nativity set.

This is always a fun activity that tends to grow even more important as we age. Set it up with the manger empty and the wise men at the other end of the room or house. Throughout the Advent and Christmas season the wise men move closer to the manager and, of course, on Christmas morning, the Christ child appears in the manger.

One of my friends has a rich collection of nativity sets from around the world which she sets up in different parts of the house to remind her that the story of Jesus is powerful in every culture. World Nativity has an amazing set of images of nativity sets from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. YonderStar is another site that sells Nativity sets, many of them fair trade. They also contribute 10% of their profits to Nature Conservancy and Food for the Poor. Ten Thousand Villages also has Fair Trade nativity sets from around the world.

One creative twist on the traditional nativity set is to give each family member an empty manger on the first Sunday of Advent. A small cereal box covered with bright paper will do as well. At bedtime, the children draw straws for each kind deed performed in honor of baby Jesus as his birthday surprise. The straws are placed in the child’s manger or box daily. It is amazing how much love a child can put into Advent when she or he is preparing for his redeemer’s coming in grace. 

On Christmas, each child finds an infant in his manger, placed on a small table or a chair beside his or her bed. Usually it is a tiny doll, beautifully dressed. This custom fills the child with a longing in Advent, and provides an image of the redeemer as the first happy glance in the morning and the last impression at night during the entire Christmas season.

Make a Jesse Tree

The Jesse Tree represents the family tree, or genealogy of Jesus Christ. It tells the story of God’s salvation plan, beginning with creation and continuing through the Old Testament, to the coming of the Messiah. The name comes from Isaiah 11:1, “Then a shoot will spring from the stem of Jesse, and a branch from his roots will bear fruit.” (NASB)

Each day of Advent, a homemade ornament is added to the Jesse Tree, a small tree made of evergreen branches. These symbolic ornaments can each represent a prophecy foretelling of Christ. Other variations include creating ornaments that represent the ancestors in the lineage of Christ, or using the various monogram symbols of Christianity as handmade ornaments. Before a symbol is hung on the branch, a Bible passage or a story from a story Bible is read.

This is part of a series on Christmas/Advent resources. 

Resources from Godspace for Advent and Christmas

Godspace has a variety of resources available for celebrating this season.

Check out the entire resource list here for more ideas for Advent and Christmas.

Godspace has a number of Advent resources available for both free download and purchase. Visit our store.

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Advent Resources – Godspace November 25, 2016 - 3:01 am

[…] Advent Activities for Families and Kids, Updated for 2016 […]

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