Mrs Wallergård's home: First Sunday of Advent: put together an adventljusstake

Sunday, December 1, 2013

First Sunday of Advent: put together an adventljusstake

Traditionally, in my family, we have been starting to put up the Christmas decorations the 8th of December. The 8th of December is the celebration of the Immaculate Conception of Maria and hence celebrated in the Catholic Church: in Italy, this results in a day of vacation.
Such tradition doesn't exist in the Protestant world and in Sweden, everything starts with the first Sunday of Advent, which was today, this year (of course, this would not be valid for the Ambrosian Catholic as I am, since we have six weeks of advent ;-)).
In particular, today is so important for the Swedes, that most of them remember that they can go to church and then they spend the rest of the day drinking glögg (warm spiced wine) and eating typical Christmas buns/cookies/etc (and then, they continue until Chrismas!).
The First of Advent is also the designated day to get out the adventljusstake (in this case a candlestick with four candles) and lit the first candle.

We have never had such thing. But, this year we decided to have one and we made one that required some small amount of handcrafting.

The "ingredients"

We bought a little tray, a red white dotted ribbon, four numbers carved in a metal blade, pine cones (yes, we are too lazy to go and take them in the woods) and some moss.

A first step forward

Very quickly, I dressed the candles with the numbers, placed them in the tray and surrounded them with the moss.

Painting pine cones

In the meanwhile, we took some white color and paint the pine cones to get a more "winter time" look.

Playing with the gluegun

While they were drying, we decorated the tray with the ribbon. This was a bit hard, because it actually required to people to work together. One using the glue gun, the other one holding the ribbon all around the tray.