Advent amid December’s busyness invites households to slow down, choose simple grounding practices and make space for Christ’s light, says pastor and writer Talashia Keim Yoder.
Talashia Keim Yoder lives in Goshen, Indiana, with her husband and two children. She is a pastor at College Mennonite Church, Goshen, Indiana, the writer for MC USA’s Advent at Home and Lent at Home worship guides and is the content provider for www.buildingfamily.com.
Download the 2025 Advent at Home worship guide here.
I always wish Advent came at a slower time of year. Any time of the year can be busy, but the holiday season takes calendar clutter to a whole new level. Church activities ramp up. If there are young people in your life, you have the addition of school concerts, instrument recitals, holiday tournaments and all the lovely things local organizations plan for children in December. Then there are the opportunities that make the season magical, like Christmas light-lit parks. Add to that family gatherings, preparing for gift exchanges, holiday baking, decorating the house and all the other holiday traditions. Amid all of this, how in the world are we to say yes to the spiritual invitation of Advent? And my goodness, how are we going to add a nightly or weekly ritual to our already full lives?
This is something I wrestle with every year – as a pastor, a parent and a human. And every year, I notice that there are spiritual invitations in my questions.
I wonder if it’s precisely this calendar clutter that makes the call of Advent so important. The call to patience, waiting, wonder and anticipation. The call to prepare for the Light of the World to break into our reality. To turn out the lights, take a breath, and light a candle. I admittedly want to gag a little when I hear the phrase “reason for the season,” but Advent does remind us that this is our yearly reminder to pay attention to God breaking into the human world. And if we are only calendar-driven in December, we might miss out on that wondrous invitation.
A dear congregant pointed out to me that the materials I write for the At-Home guide are dense – and, perhaps, counterproductive to what they’re trying to achieve. Noted for future years! For now, though, I’ll offer this counsel for using the resource: Don’t try to read it all, and for sure don’t try to do it all! It is meant to be a menu, and most of the menu items are substantial and nutritious enough to be a good meal by themselves. Scan it and find the offerings that are most helpful for your household. Then let the rest go.
My children are 12 and 15 years old. Given their stage of life, this is how my family will respond to the invitation of Advent this year and how we’ll use the at-home resource:
- Each night before our youngest goes to bed, we will light our Advent candles, recite the story from Luke 2, pray and sing a song as we blow out the candles. When the evening has gotten too late, we’ll omit reciting the story. This has been our tradition for 15 years, so it feels right and good to all of us.
- When we sit down to eat together during the week, we will hopefully do the Fire and Star chat during the meal. Our best bet for making this happen is probably to ask our youngest to be in charge of reminding us at each mealtime.
- On Saturday nights, we will turn out the lights and light our kerosene lamps. We’ll eat our simple meal together, read the week’s Bible passage, and let one person each week choose which prompts we’ll focus on for interaction with the story. Our goal will be to do this every week, but realistically, we’ll probably miss a week.
- We might do the Journey to the Manger. We usually start it, then forget about it until the kids are on Christmas break, so Mary and Joseph race to the manger in the few days before Christmas.
Even this, with all of my attempts at realistic caveats, is a little ambitious. Because December is December. But I think that now, more than ever in my lifetime, we need the light of Christ to break in. And so, we will pause, breathe, light a candle and welcome the Light of the World.