I hate Halloween. I’m like a Halloween Grinch.
And I especially hate that Halloween falls during my birthday month (yes, I’m that annoying person who wants the whole month to be about me), so that all of October as I’m admiring the gorgeous fall colors, giant plastic pumpkins and creepy skeletons keep intruding. There’s a giant plastic spider in a polyester web over an exam room at work that made one of my young patients scream the other day, and I knew just how he felt.
This is what I love about October.
And this, too.
The one thing I like about Halloween is that it tells me Advent is almost here. Don’t get me wrong, I love Thanksgiving and especially Christ the King Sunday (the last Sunday before Advent, this year on November 20). But I especially love Advent. It’s a season of contemplation and prayer.
I love that the Giant Retail Machine has not figured out how to turn Advent into a commercial enterprise.
In a fit of pique about a particularly icky lawn ornament I saw the other day, I came home and pulled out our Advent books, just to see if there were any gaps I wanted to fill in. (There were. I ordered a few new-to-us books.)
If you don’t have any Advent traditions, or want to know what the Advent fuss is all about, let me recommend a few of my favorite Advent resources.
For advance planning and ideas for how to meditate and celebrate at home, I recommend Let Us Keep the Feast, edited by Jessica Snell. For each of the church seasons, it provides a collection of resources, including an introduction to the season, an explanation of the calendar, information on seasonal traditions- old, new and international, seasonal recipes, suggestions for how to celebrate with the very young, ways to serve beyond the home, selected readings, music and prayers. (I wrote the section on Ordinary Time, but that isn’t my favorite one.) The book is available from Doulos Resources, or Amazon, both in electronic, pdf and paperback forms.
Elizabeth Foss has an Advent devotional called Comfort and Joy that looks beautiful (though I haven’t tried it.) She also has some lovely book lists I’ve used to shape our collection of special books we read during Advent.
In past years we have enjoyed Geraldine McCaughrean’s The Jesse Tree, which we’ve read as an Advent family devotion. This year, I think we’ll be back to Ann Voskamp’s Unwrapping the Gift: A Family Celebration of Christmas.
Do you have an Advent resource to recommend as we look ahead (past Halloween)? Please share in the comments.
Learning As We Go 