"Jesus" Tree

 In an effort to teach Ainsley (and refocus all of us) that Christmas is really about the celebration of the birth of Jesus, we started the tradition of the Jesse Tree (or Jesus Tree, as she called it) this year.  The Jesse Tree traces the spiritual family tree of Jesus Christ and each night during December we read a different bible story, each of which lead up to Christ's birth.  The idea of the Jesse Tree comes from Isaiah 11: "There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots."  Jesse was the father of David, who became a great King and it was in his line that Jesus was born thousands of years later fulfilling God's prophecies.  We added an ornament symbol of each story on the tree every night after the bible reading.  This year we used Ainsley's Jesus Storybook bible so that the stories were more on her level but I'm hopeful in future years this tradition transitions and grows as our family matures.

In preparing these ornaments, I had grand visions of all the quality family time that was going to take place as a result of this... but once we started I had to quickly lower my expectations to more realistic levels.  We tried to get through the story as a family the first night but Bailey's attention span wasn't long enough and ended up causing more trouble than good, so we ended up just reading the stories with Ainsley after Bailey was in bed.  This worked well and I was proud of how thoughtful and inquisitive Ainsley was about most of the stories.  I was also proud that we we able to keep it up the whole month, only skipping and having to double up a few times.

So as not to misled anyone into thinking that "we've got it all together", I will admit that after going over and over the story of Jesus' birth in numerous forms (Jesse Tree readings, Christmas story books, advent calendar, songs, plays, nativities, coloring pages, and on and on) I caught Ainsley playing with the nativity set saying, "Here's where the wise men and the shepherds go and they are coming to visit baby Jesus and Joseph and Mary-Weather."  What?!  Oh, you mean Merryweather, the fairy from Sleeping Beauty!  Ha!  Made me laugh so hard.  Then we worked the rest of the month to correct her. Sigh.  What can you do.