Our new Advent calendar was a hit with the children because each day would reveal something fun to do, but I wanted more spiritual depth, even though they were young. We were a Christian family and wanted to teach our children the faith, so we soon added the tradition of a Jesse Tree, thanks again to the internet. In this enterprise, children hang one ornament per day on a tree (separate from the family’s main Christmas tree), each ornament representing a different point in biblical history, starting with creation and culminating on Christmas Day with the birth of Christ. Our kids made homemade Shrinky-Dink ornaments. And we’d ostensibly read a passage from the Bible every evening and hang the day’s ornament (usually with a brief scuffle over whose turn it was to do the hanging).

This new ritual dovetailed somewhat smoothly into our continuing Advent countdown calendar practice — for the couple of weeks of the month. But soon there would be an unavoidable company Christmas party one evening, a busy day culminating with a choir concert, or some other typical reason for a late bedtime, so we’d skip a day’s Jesse Tree reading and double up the next day. This was fine for one day, but when the inescapable busyness of our modern-day December snowballed into four or five days missed in succession, it resulted in an hour-long ceremony of ornaments, Bible reading, frustrated short attention spans of the very young, and inevitable meltdowns from the children (as well as the adults, behind closed doors after storytime and goodnight kisses).

This was too much for us. There had to be something stable, something bigger outside ourselves, that invited our family to a full observance of Christmas without relegating us parents to a holiday cruise-director-style role of micromanaging juvenile expectations. I’d wonder: were these expectations even real, or was it my own self-induced pressure that created the illusion of these expectations in the first place? 

Concurrently during these years of attempting to spearhead our Jesse Tree and countdown calendar traditions, my husband and I were also dipping our toes in the waters of an older approach to religious worship. We both found our modern, Americanized religious affections wearying and bereft of substratum, a free-falling, choose-your-own-adventure style of reverence to the timeless God of the universe. We had spent our early marriage years outside our home country, and had discovered in these unfamiliar cultures expressions of faith that were much, much older than both ourselves and the twenty-first-century zeitgeist in which we lived. It had scratched an itch we didn’t know we had, and it had left us itchy ever since, even back in (especially back in?) our homeland.