Jesse Tree...

I realize we are months away from the holiday season but there is something to be said for planning ahead, right? :) A couple months back my sweet friend, Amy, sent out an email seeing if anyone in our church was interested in doing a Jesse Tree ornament swap. (For those who don't know what a Jesse Tree is...it's a set of daily devotions for the month of December. Each day focuses on a different aspect of the bible and telling the history of Jesus' family tree leading up to his birth.) There is a symbol that represents each day and this is what people turn in to an ornament to hang on their tree. So, each day you do the devotion and then hang a new ornament. 

Well, Amy decided that since the fall is always so chaotic leading in to the holiday season that we should prep our ornaments now. Instead of having to create 25 different ornaments each person created 25 of the same ornaments for a particular day. I had Day 20-The Exile and my symbol was the Fiery Furnace. We had several weeks to work on our ornaments before we all got together to swap them out and build our collection. It was wonderful to sit and hear the stories behind each ornament. One of the ladies in our swap has teenagers and they have been doing the Jesse Tree since her children were little. She has several sets of ornaments and she plans to give a set to each child one day. I loved that idea...maybe one day I'll have multiple sets but for now we are going to look forward to using this set in  a few short months. I plan to post pictures of my collection this Christmas. 

 Some of the ladies from our swap in our new church building...we are having Avi-Kate's birthday party in this space next weekend.

 A sneak peak at some of my ornaments labeled in baggies and ready to go this Christmas. Amy also created a card that had who made what for each day. It fits inside our devotion book perfectly.

If you have questions about how we organized this let me know. It really was a lot of fun and I'm really looking forward to having this already to go starting December 1st. I've also found Jesse Tree activity ideas, printables, etc. that I'm hoping to use with the kids to tie everything together. More to come once we hit the holiday season but I had to go ahead and at least share what I've been working on the last few weeks.