Jesse Tree Reminder!!

Just a reminder to all of you who participated in the Jesse Tree project this past year!! Tonight is the night to get started!! You'll start with the creation story and it's the ornament that looks like a globe. The devotional book, which can be found HERE, is helpful but not necessary!! You just basically need to know the order of the ornaments and be able to talk about them a little bit. I listed the order of the ornaments on a different post HERE. I'm praying that this little tradition helps bring you and your family closer to Jesus. I know that for me personally it was one of my favorite parts of last Christmas. We would gather around our little tree in our pjs. Turn out the lights and Christian would put the ornament on the tree and we would talk about it (rarely did we actually read from the book...I looked over it ahead of time ((like 2 minutes ahead of time)) and then was able to just have a discussion about that particular ornament). Then we would sing "Away in a Manger" and then Daddy would pray! Just remember that it's not about imparting some great Biblical knowlege, it's just about pointing their hearts to Jesus. The best part is that it help you be intentional about mentioning the name of Jesus everyday in December!

I was pretty bummed a few weeks ago when I realized that we wouldn't be doing our Jesse Tree this year. The tree and the ornaments are buried in our storage unit. The unit is 20 feet deep and even though I had a pretty good idea of where they were (way in the back) It was just not possible to get to them. But then the doorbell rang this morning and the FedEx guy was standing there with a box that I had to sign for. And inside were 25 very familiar ornaments. A dear friend, who is simply God's gift to me, had sent me her set of ornaments. After I stopped crying I loaded the kids up and headed over to the storage unit. I was determined to find our little tree or go buy one.

Don't tell Ryan, but I boosted Christian up on top of boxes and he crawled about 6 feet back into the storage unit and tried to describe what we were looking for.

And look what he found!!! He said "Mom, don't we need Baby Jesus for Christmas?" WooHoo!!! He found our nativity!! So we got that out. He found a random Curious George Christmas book in a box full of other stuff and he found our little tree that we use for our Jesse Tree!! Yippee! It was totally a God thing! We saw a few other Christmas things, but weren't able to get to them. But how perfect that we will have our Nativity and our Jesse Tree this year!