December 1st, it’s more fun and meaningful than I thought it would be.
Early last month I saw a post on http://heartfelttruths.wordpress.com/advent-calendar/ about the felt board advent calendar. It was just what I wanted, even though I didn’t know what exactly I wanted until I saw it. My twin boys are 2yr. They don’t get the reason behind Christmas yet. They won’t sit and comprehend the reading of the Christmas story out of the Bible. Heck, they don’t even get Santa yet. But I still wanted to find something that would start to make sense to them about Christmas being a celebration of Jesus’ birth. That’s were Heart Felt Truths’ felt advent calendar comes in.
Thankfully she was offering a free pattern for the set. I didn’t have a ton of time to sit there cutting out every little piece and making my scene look as lovely as a picture. Nor do I think my boys will care how detailed it looks! All it took was one afternoon, during the boy’s nap, to trace all the pieces onto felt and cut them out. The next day I took Elmer’s glue and layered all the pieces together. I put the scripture reading page and all the felt pieces into a bag and stored it away until Dec 1st.
Yesterday was Dec 1st and before bed, I pulled out our felt board and my advent kit. The first reading was a few sentences about the angel of the Lord announcing to Mary that she was with child. I proudly pulled out Mary and put her up on the board. Then I had each boy say Mary’s name out loud. Lance wanted to hold her for a few minutes then Mary and the board was put away for the night.
Tonight I’ll get the board back out, read over yesterday’s reading, add Mary, read the next part of the story and add a new felt piece next to Mary. I can’t wait until the end of the month to read the whole story to the boys and put all the cute little pieces on the board. It’s not anything grand, but I just loved starting to tell the story of Christmas to my boys. I love that they will hear pieces of the story repeated night after night. Again, it’s not earth shattering, but someday this story will be life changing for my boys if they accept Jesus as their savior.
At the end of the month, I’ll post a picture of my final felt scene. In the meanwhile, below is what Heart Felt Truths’ advent calendar looks like.
Mercies Raining Down 
