Advent at last!

A week ago a cold was rooting itself in my head.  I was three days away from turning in my grant.  And not least of all, Christians celebrated the "New Year" with the first Sunday of Advent.  Fr. Don likes to say that we are not actually preparing for the a baby to be born, but we are preparing our hearts and ourselves to receive God anew.  God wants to pour God's entireness and love into our beings, so we can be Christ to each other.  But sometimes we are too full of ourselves to make much room.  I'm terribly summarizing his great homilies of the last two weeks, but I just wish everyone could hear him.  If only we worried about living our faith as much as we worry about how much we spend on gifts and if people will like what we got for them.  Goodness!  And the truth is that I still worry about that other stuff.  We all take time to be how we want to live.   But I'm drawn to this season of waiting because of the rich traditions my family shared.  So I am going to try to post as many of them as I can remember:   I miss the Advent wreath.  I still remember the prayers we would say for the different weeks (though not terribly well).  We made placemats with the little candle shaped cutouts with each week's prayer typed up.  Mom laminated them at the advent fair, and we would pull them out in December.  There was also the ring of different prayer cards, too.  Mostly it sat on our dinner table, which was when we took turns sitting by the window, so we could light or blow out the candles.  Dad loved to make the wreath larger and more beautiful each year until it took up a whole place at the table.  When we were little, the wreath was in the living room, and Nicholas singed his eyebrows or arm hair - maybe something caught on fire?  Last year I was climbing Mt Piltriquitron in Patagonia, and at the "refugio" where we stopped to snack and have a beer on our way back down, Peggy pulled out a birthday candle to light for the first week of Advent.  Ahh...the first sign of advent are the candles and the wreath!   peace and blessings...