When I was a lad, my parents would occasionally have Advent services. They’d read from some little booklet they got from church, and we’d sing a Christmas carol or two. I recall not liking it that much as a kid, but when I had kids, I decided to try again, and try to make it more fun.
You have to have an advent wreath, or a yule log. Ours used to be made of evergreen branches, with a little thing in the middle for the candles. That was sometimes a fun family project — gathering the greens and making the wreath. But now we have a simpler one.
In the service itself, you light one candle on the first Sunday of Advent, two on the second, etc. The pink candle is for the 3rd Sunday. The white candle in the middle is for Christmas day.
There would always be cookies and egg nog. (And whiskey or sometimes port for dad.)
We’d always start with a Bible reading relevant to Christmas, then everybody would pick a Christmas carol and we’d sing. We’d end with the Lord’s Prayer.
My kids loved it, and always wanted to do it, even after they moved out. So this morning we tried to do it over WhatsApp. It didn’t work that well. There’s just enough of a delay to make group singing difficult. Whoever starts the song (usually me) has to plow on, heedless of the discord.
The odd thing was that Captain Crowhill in Korea had less of a delay than Mr. and Mrs. Crowhill (jr.) just up the road.
It’s a nice custom. It makes it feel like Christmas, and it’s not about presents or buying things.
(About breakfast. We had to do it in the morning to accommodate time zones. We would normally do it at night.)
Lovely idea. Maybe instead of a video conference, you could try a live stream? Less sense of the others being there with you, but easier for everyone to join in with the singing and such because lag doesn’t reflect back. It’s too bad there isn’t a way to both have the sense of presence and sidestep the effects of delay. Maybe in five years there will be.
Or even, do the video conference but have the remote guests mute their audio off for the singing. Sure, you don’t get to all hear each other but that’s no worse than weird delays that don’t sound good anyway.
Amazing. I didn’t know a thing about Advent until I was about 26. Before that, however, I was among people who claimed to have a personal relationship with Jesus.