How do you celebrate Advent?

In the Netherlands, we celebrate Advent. I don’t know if that exists in your country, so I searched the interwebs to look at the definition of what we celebrate / do / should do? during that Advent time:

The four weeks leading up to Christmas are called Advent. During this period, Christians await the arrival of the baby Jesus.

Now Jesus has indeed come to the world (Luke 1:26-38 and 2:1-20) so in that regard we can stop celebrating Advent, right? Well, uhhhh…. no. Because, Jesus is coming again! ( Revelation 1:7 ) So, then the question is how you celebrate that today.

Something about a Christmas tree and then what…?

On this side of the globe, again this year, we choose to have our place FULL of activities during Advent. Although we are not at home right now, our house is now full of Koreans who use our house as a “meeting location”, we celebrate Christmas a number of times, New Year’s Eve as well, an extra movie night for expats, and it will be a wonderfully busy period with many more activities. Why?

Part of it is, of course, because it is fun to celebrate this period with friends. But the real reason we celebrate it specifically this way: Jesus is coming back! And that could be tomorrow! Maybe this will be our last time celebrating Christmas. Who knows? Now we still have the opportunity to share and celebrate THE Christmas story with as many people as possible. Not only fun to do, but also with an underlying goal: now it’s still possible, come on, get to work! Who is having a hard time, who could use a little more attention, who could use the Good news in the dark days of December?

Come on, get to work, invite people, while we still have time to do so…