Mormon Jesse tree

This is a fairly new Christmas tradition at our house. We use it as our daily Advent countdown. We call it a Mormon Jesse Tree. You can google Jesse tree to see what that means to the wider Christian world. This is a Mormon version. I found the list of symbols and scriptures and other info on the internet by doing a search for "Mormon Jesse Tree".

We used to have a traditional Santa advent calendar but since we were trying to put less emphasis on Santa, I got the the point where I didn't want to use it anymore. What I really wanted was a Nativity version or something that would be more Christ-centered. I ran across the idea of a Jesse Tree somewhere and thought I could try to tweak it to fit better with our beliefs, then thought maybe someone had already done that. Lo and behold, someone had and had shared their work on their blog.

Since it was close to Christmas when I found it, I hurriedly printed out the symbols with clipart and matted them. I also decided to just put them up on a wreath I already had instead of trying to find a branch. It worked fine and we enjoyed this way to lead in to Christmas, but I knew I wanted to do something cuter than printed cartoons on a wreath eventually.

So, here it is 3 or 4 years later and we have a mix of printed cartoons and felt symbols because the next year I thought it would be cute to make the daily symbols out of felt. I had NO idea how time-consuming and tedious that would be. As you can see I got disillusioned and gave that idea up. I still like the idea of something other than paper, but I don't know yet what it will be.

Maybe we will just have a hodgepodge forever, because you know, it really just doesn't matter. What really matters is what each symbol is representative of. Each piece represents a witness or type or shadow of Christ. From all the standard works. Each night as we open a little door on the Advent house and pull the symbol out we read the associated scriptures and the kids try to determine WHO the witness is and we review their story and how they are a witness or type or shadow of Christ. I thought it would get boring and they'd be uninterested after a couple of years, but they still enjoy it. Their answers are becoming more thoughtful and insightful. This is a great tradition that I think has proved itself and will be a keeper.

Our advent wreath.

Our advent house which houses the symbols. It was given to us and we used to put candy in the doors,
but this is a much better use for it. 

I'm so glad I decided to retire our Santa Advent calendar!