Last year I posted about our last-minute advent calendar. We picked 25 Christmas songs and sang a different one each day. I printed them out and put them on cards along with a free printable advent calendar that I found. Then we hung them up in our living room at the end of each day. So by Christmas it looked like this:
I thought I'd share our list in case anyone is interested in what we're doing. As I went through it this year, I changed a couple of songs out so this is the newest list. In the past year I've also stumbled across this Advent Devotional-- Sing of His Birth, I haven't looked too closely, but it has some questions to go with each song on her list, so I might use some of that this year to reflect on them. We also are planning to read a story about the birth of Christ from the Storybook Bible every Sunday for our family devotional time and I'll probably throw in a few activities throughout the week with Cooper as inspiration strikes, so I'll be sure to share those as we do them. But we don't have much planned for each day other than to sing the song and think about what it means!
1. O come, O Come Emmanuel
2. The First Noel
3. O Come All Ye Faithful
4. Away in a Manger
5. Go Tell it on the Mountain
6. O Little Town of Bethlehem
7. We Three Kings
8. Angels we have Heard on High
9. Mary did you Know?
10. Little Drummer Boy
11. Come Thou Long Expected Jesus
12. What Child is This?
13. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
14. It Came Upon a Midnight Clear
15. Hark the Herald Angels Sing
16. Ring Christmas Bells
17. Good Christian Men Rejoice
18. Do You Hear What I Hear?
19. Angels from the Realms of Glory
20. He is Born
21. O Holy Night
22. Sing We Now of Christmas
23. I hear the Bells on Christmas Day
24. Silent Night
25. Joy to the World!
Since it was such a last-minute decision last year, there were a few things we didn't think through all the way and are changing this year. First of all, we originally taped the songs onto the ribbon that was hanging and the tape didn't hold it super well (and also ruined the back of the cards), so we started using small clothes pins to hang them and that worked much better. The other thing is that last year we had the cards in a basket on our island and pulled one out each day and then hung it up. This year I hung them all up with the numbers facing out (so right now it looks like it did at the end of last Christmas season) and then we'll take it down and when the day is done I plan to hang them back up turned around so it's more of a countdown with the numbers showing which days are left.
We will start them next weekend on December 1, but while we were decorating for Christmas this weekend I went ahead and put them up. Looking forward to trying this out again this year now that Cooper is even more into music and trying to sing along with us!
Also as one final note... because we ruined so many of the cards last year with tape, I retyped and formatted all the lyrics in one document this year-- if anyone wants it I'm happy to share, just let me know!
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