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If there can be “Christmas in July,” why not “Advent in June”? At least that’s the conclusion we reached today driving the first leg from Dallas to New Mexico en route to the Great Homeschool convention in Ontario California.
More accurately, we began preparing for Advent in our own minds by drawing up topics for the 2016 Advent Calendar. After all, it takes time to research and write the daily entries, and there’s no time like the present to get started, right?
In case you are new to it, we here at Professor Carol have been offering a free Advent Calendar for several years now. It arrives daily in your email and covers both the biblical and liturgical topics you’d expect, plus many you might not involving music, art, poetry, history, festivals, culinary and cultural traditions pertinent to the season. The daily entries feature lovely pictures. Some link to short video clips of interest or interesting performances.
Many of you have been receiving the calendar for awhile already, and we’re so glad you’ve liked it. We appreciate your heartfelt letters responding to the calendar as a whole and to individual posts that particularly touched you. In fact, those very responses led us to publish a volume of the best-loved calendar entries late in 2015 as both a printed book and an e-book. We set up that publication to be applicable to the schedule of Advent in any given year, so it’s always relevant, no matter what the year.
And Advent 2016 is going to be a long one! Why? Well, Christmas will fall on a Sunday this year, allowing for the maximum scope of four Sundays before Advent, and a full week leading up to Christmas Day. That’s a lot of entries, and that explains why we need to get started on those topics. So while looking across the vast horizons of New Mexico yesterday, we made an initial list of themes.
I’m writing about this today because I would love to solicit your ideas for the 2016 Advent Calendar. Quite a few entries over the years have been prompted by readers and they’ve been some of our most effective. Think through your family traditions or experiences from your childhood. Think of passages in literature or pieces of music that have inspired your Christmas preparations. Tell me about things you like to bake that stretch way back into your family heritage.
I can’t say for sure what will eventually make it into the 2016 calendar. I’ll be leading a Smithsonian tour through the Christmas markets of France and Germany later this year, and that will also lead to some new ideas. But I’m sure those of you who read the calendar can come up with topics I would never think of. So please leave a comment or start a discussion on the forum.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to see some of the past entries that have been collected into our published calendar, you’ll find it here.
But for now, it’s up and at ‘em again, and on to Barstow California for another overnight (keep going, trusty vehicle, keep going). And then, boom, we drop into another exciting conference filled with talks, panels, bustle, and the joy of visiting with our treasured students, families, and professional colleagues in this fascinating venture in education.