As the Nativity fast rapidly approaches I am starting to prepare for the onslaught of all things Christmas. I LOVE Christmas time and everything that goes with it! I am one of those crazy people who listens to Christmas music year round and wants to decorate to moment Thanksgiving dinner is over. A few years ago as a part of my preparation I created a 40 day advent calendar out of baby food jars for my kids. I followed the ideas found in this blog but tweaked them a bit. The idea behind this calendar is to give us a different topic each day to discuss to keep us focused on Christ through out the craze of the holiday season. This is especially important as we need to try to keep the sobriety of the fast while society is feasting around us. Every jar has two things in it, a picture of our topic for the day and a small candy. There are short explanations for each topic that can help guide any discussions or simply serve as your message for that day.
This year I am trying something new. In order to help us stay a bit more engaged on our topic for the day I created a coloring book that matches our topics. Now each day after opening our jar we can find the corresponding page in our coloring book and talk about that topic while the kids color. I have no idea if this will actually work but I look forward to trying!
Feel free to download the coloring book for your own family's use!
**If you want to print the booklet please print odd pages first and then flip pages over and print even pages on the opposite side. The words and pictures are staggered to allow for the book to be folded in half and either stapled or sewn together**
Feel free to download the coloring book for your own family's use!
**If you want to print the booklet please print odd pages first and then flip pages over and print even pages on the opposite side. The words and pictures are staggered to allow for the book to be folded in half and either stapled or sewn together**
Thank you for this wonderful item! I'm attempting to print it off right now for my two of my little ones.
ReplyDeleteHi for those trying to figure out printing this beautiful coloring book, if you have a duplex printer, all that you need to do is print double sided, flip on short edge. Make sure in print preview that the page appears landscape (when I did it from my phone it changed to portrait for some reason). I tried printing odd then flipping over and got the pages in the wrong order...
ReplyDeleteI'm sharing this with my parish. I'm a Sunday School Director at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in St. Louis. Thank you for this wonderful idea.
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