Jesse Tree

Since the first time I heard of a Jesse Tree I wanted to do one.  Just in case you don't know, a Jesse Tree is basically a countdown to Christmas where you put on an ornament, representing a Bible story, each night of advent.  Each of the stories point to Christ and it is called a "Jesse" tree because of the prophesy in Isaiah 11 that a shoot {Jesus} will grow out of Jesse's root stock.

Well this year a wonderful woman in our church organized everything so that we would each make 25 of one ornament {chosen from the 25 different stories} and then we got together and put the sets together so we each had a complete set of 25 different ornaments.  It was a lot of fun to see what everyone came up with and I'm so excited to have a neat set like this.  I know I would never get around to doing an ormanent for 25 different stories all on my own.

Last year we actually did a Jesse Tree too, but we used Ann Voskamp's free printable {if you are interested in that I'm sure you can search around for it; it came with printable ornaments}.  I enjoyed that, but her writing just was not useful for a kids devotional.  This year we are using this book.  It has both a children's and adult devotional.  It is much better, but some nights I still feel like we need to pull the kids Bible out and show them the story from that Bible as well.  The one we are using for homeschool is a pretty good book of preschool level Bible stories.

Anyway, here is a very poor picture of the tree...so far.

and the ornaments I made...

 Shoot from the stump of Jesse

Baby Jesus {with giant camera flash.  I suppose I should learn a thing or two about taking pictures someday.}

And, I brought these cookies to the party.  

Gluten free, but they stayed together and people actually liked them!  Yes, those are Hershey Kisses.  I'm on board with limiting our chocolate purchases, but was desperate and I've yet to actually find ANY fair trade chocolate in my grocery store or any store I shop more than twice a year {which I haven't been to yet because it is 30 miles away.  In other words, don't judge me}.