Memories of Goodness, Doors of Hope

"Advent is concerned with that very connection between memory and hope which is so necessary to man. Advent’s intention is to awaken the most profound and basic emotional memory within us, namely, the memory of the God who became a child. This is a healing memory; it brings hope. The purpose of the Church’s year is continually to rehearse her great history of memories, to awaken the heart’s memory so that it can discern the star of hope.…

It is the beautiful task of Advent to awaken in all of us memories of goodness and thus to open doors of hope."

--Cardinal Ratzinger, Seek That Which Is Above

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I found this Advent Tree that my mother in law made for her own children and handed on to us. We used to hang it up in Oregon where we lived when the older kids were small. It got misplaced when we moved here to California several years ago and my 11 year old just found it. So today I hung it up:


You can see the numbered pockets at the bottom for every day of December. My mother in law put old bits of jewelry and "sparklies" in the pockets and every day the kids would dig out the treasure for the day and hang it on the tree. You can barely see the first 3 treasures hanging up. My daughter, who loves vintage things, was fascinated by the jewelry from 40-50 years ago. It is history now!

I was thinking how easy it would be to make this into a Jesse Tree using the ornament ideas and images you can find all over the internet. But the sparklies are family tradition, so we will not abandon those even if we do add on to them.

Aidan took over the camera and got a picture of me ---

and of his daddy -- you can tell it is getting colder around here by the way we move closer to the fire~!

And a very artistic one of his sister with her violin:

"Advent’s intention is to awaken the most profound and basic emotional memory within us, namely, the memory of the God who became a child. This is a healing memory; it brings hope.”

Liam holding his baby brother Patrick Gabriel who came home from the ICU on Christmas Eve. Paddy's fifth birthday is today!