For me, this month is both something I love—and something I don’t love so much. I really enjoy all the preparations for Christmas. I also enjoy celebrating St. Nicholas and St. Lucia. When Theo Vilje was closer to two, he loved this too. He would walk around the garden with a stick, singing the St. Lucia song on his own, and he loved the idea of cleaning his shoes. Our neighbor, who learned to put on his shoes before turning one, was also fascinated by all the polished shoes. Since we spent a lot of time outside, the bigger kids joined in and ended up cleaning our porch several days in a row.

Waiting with a toddler

In Theo Vilje’s Advent calendar, we usually include mostly vegetables or fruits. Sometimes he gets a book that’s been hidden away for a while, or we do an activity related to the preparations—like cleaning shoes. In this way, we try to show the meaning of Advent by marking the waiting time and gradually moving closer to Christmas. We also place one new item on the nature table each day. By the end of the month, it turns into complete chaos—which I don’t enjoy—but Theo Vilje loves visiting the table, pulling everything down onto the floor and (sometimes, with a lot of guidance) putting it all back up again.

Patience and more waiting

I’m not particularly fond of waiting, and Christmas involves a lot of it. That’s probably why this isn’t my favorite time of year. I have to practice patience—and so does Theo Vilje. Even Simen, who has more patience than I do, sometimes agrees that there’s a lot of waiting packed into this month. Over the past few years, we’ve tried to slow down and spend more time together, focusing on our own traditions as a family. That makes it a bit easier to handle the waiting.

You might not realize it at first, but this time of year is full of waiting: you wait in shops, you wait in lines, you wait for replies, for dinners, for desserts, for gifts to be opened or given, for the scissors to be free, for Christmas to arrive—and then you wait for the New Year. Even though it’s lovely to have time off, we’ve found it incredibly important to make time to slow down, so we’re better able to handle all that waiting.