A few years ago I participated in the Jesse Tree ornament exchange on the Orthodox Yahoo group. The following year I coordinated an exchange among ladies within my church. The result is we have quite a beautiful collection of ornaments!
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| Creation |
To simplify things this year, I ditched my branch tree and decided our ornaments are going straight on the Christmas tree. To organize them, I purchased small metal tins from H*bby Lobby, and labeled them with the day they are to be opened. They are now sitting under our tree in our living room.
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| Adam and Eve |
There are wonderful resources for readings out there, but this year we are blessed to have a set of readings written by the Queen's godfather. They are shortened from the Biblical readings, but stay true to the wording without simplifying the language of scripture, and we are loving them! Of course, they differ from the ones we have used in the past, so I am going to need to make a few new ornaments to coordinate with these new readings.
As we open them, I thought I would try to post each week photos of the ornaments from the previous week. The ornaments posted correspond to our readings for the first week of Advent, though I need to create an ornament to correspond to our readings from Job, as well as an ornament for the Tower of Babel.
If you are looking for your own Jesse Tree readings, you can go to
Mat. Emily's blog, where she has organized a series of readings from the
Children's Bible Reader, as well as a set of coloring pages to correspond to the readings. There are also nice readings which can be found on
Festal Celebrations.
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| God's Covenant with Abraham |
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| Isaac |
Those are really very special ornaments - I'm sure you all will treasure them!
ReplyDeleteWe're really enjoying our ornaments for the second year. It's fun to see the same ones your tree. I bought a 4 ft prelit Christmas tree and we use that for them. I place it on a small table in the living room and put about 10-15 ornaments at a time in a small basket beside it. That way it's easier to find the one we need each night. Every week or so I just add more ornaments (that I've got stored in ziplocks in groups of ten) so that the basket stays full, but it's not too overwhelming to find what we want. Since we never put up our big tree until Dec. 13th, this is a nice way to have a small tree up starting on Nov. 15 and we can really feel the Christmas decorations building over the course of the fast. Our biggest problem is that we always travel to visit family for 2 weeks after Christmas. So, we never manage to do any of the ornaments between Nativity and Theophany. Maybe someday that will work out. Thanks again for the exchange!
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