The Season of Advent - Day 2

While most people know or have heard of advent calendars and Advent for December, not everyone knows that the true Season of Advent starts 4 Sundays before Christmas. That means that  this year November 28th was the beginning of Advent.
We want to teach our children about Jesus and God at an early age. One way to begin to teach children about the true meaning of Christmas is to celebrate the Advent season and explain take the time to explain it to them each day.
It can be hard to teach young children about something and know that they are really understanding it. I had seen a great post on Advent calendars and making your own over at Keeper of the Home, and it made me start thinking about Advent season in our house and how we can celebrate it. I wanted to make our calendar this year with LJ, but that isn't going to happen as we have had to much going on. Then while I was out with my mom on Saturday I saw the cutest thing at Walmart. It is a set of wall/window clings that are the Manger Scene.

There are a ton of stars with this so there are more than enough images for the entire Advent season. I like that the images are kid oriented so my son loves it.
We didn't get to start putting this up yesterday like I had hoped, so I did two images today. I got my son together with me and we cleaned the wall to make sure the clings would stick. Then I picked what would be the best images to start with: the manger and the words.

First, i put up the manger as this would be the center of the rest of the season. LJ wasn't too interested in it at first, but then he saw that mommy had put something on our wall, and that made him want to see what I was doing. I explained to him that we were starting our advent season and that this is when we celebrate Baby Jesus being born.

Once the manger was up I told LJ we were going to put up one more picture and I read what the words said. After peeling it off of the backing, I had him help me put it on the wall. He really liked helping me put something on the wall and making sure it was stuck on.

I think this is a really cute manger scene. One thing I like it that it can come off and be repositioned on the wall. I don't know if it will last more than one year, but at the price I paid, it wouldn't entirely matter and maybe next year we will finally be able to make our own family Advent Calendar that we can use year after year.
I look forward to seeing what picture LJ will want to put up tomorrow. I am going to let him pick the picture each day and then before we leave our house on Christmas Eve we will put up the last cling which I will of course make sure is the Baby Jesus asleep in the hay. :)

How do you celebrate the Advent season with your family? Do you have a calendar you use each year or some other tradition you have in prepare yourselves for Christmas? I would love to hear from you!

Until next time... Happy Advent!