10-Day Liturgy for Families

Posted by Amber Bruce |  Print This Post

Death. Despair. Doom.

What do these have to do with Christmas? In a sense, they are the reason for the season.

We don’t like to focus on them. We’d rather go straight from Thanksgiving to Christmas, from grateful feasting to lights and music and presents.

But if we skip the darkness, we miss the effect of the light.

It is in the midst of this darkness that we celebrate Light. As we anticipate Christmas – the light, the love, the joy, the peace – we must not forget the reason that Jesus’ birth was so necessary, so longed-for, so welcome, and so glorious. Jesus came to bring light to a dark world.

So how can we imbue our children with these concepts of longing for a Savior and light contrasted with darkness?

A friend recommended this “floor-banging liturgy” to our family several years ago, and it has become one of our favorite traditions. It begins 10 days before Christmas. We look forward to the coming Savior through the eyes of Adam, Noah, Abraham, David, and the prophets. We sing a verse of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” that fits with that night’s theme, while keeping time with sanitized turkey bones.* It uses all five senses, with candles, sand, vinegar, keeping the rhythm, and a tiny taste of chocolate!

We have used this liturgy for the past five years. We used an abridged version the first few years when our oldest children were preschool-aged. Now that we have a couple adept readers, we use the full version, giving each of them a chance to read some of the lines.

*The author of the liturgy uses wooden dowels to imitate bones, but I thought the imagery would be lost on my young children. I suppose having worked designing orthopedic surgical tools, and having to handle human bones in that capacity, has inured me to the idea of using real bones. So one year, I took our Thanksgiving turkey bones and made broth, then cleaned the bones to use for this liturgy. However, I have learned to keep them in a box or in a back room because my neighbor was quite startled to see a pile of bones sitting on our side table last year!