Fling open every door! An Altoid Advent

Chers Amis,

Advent starts this Sunday and it is time to "fling open every door" and prepare our hearts for our King's Christmas arrival. This is the theme for our Advent - Open the Doors! It comes from a little booklet by the same title that a friend gave me last year (oop). It is a series of daily Advent devotions for the Church's youngest members. Each day there is a little meditation on opening some door in joyous expectation of the Christmas season. Opening your hearts, mailbox, oven, church, home, nursery, the inn, etc. It is very simple and leads to natural rabbit trails. With this theme in mind, I wanted to find a craft that focused on opening doors beyond the typical Advent calendars that we have made in the past. I also wanted to do something lasting that would use materials at hand. Hmm. Caddie and I found the perfect solution at Stamp Camp of all places, while doing a Google image search on St. Gertrude the Great! They suggest making a miniature shrine
inside an Altoid tin using their vintage stamps of saints. My dh loves cinnamon Altoids so the girls were on a mission to find as many tins as they could. We are up to 7 and dh has a tin half full - that would make 8! We decided that we do not have enough to make a full Advent calender - that will have to wait until next year. But, it would work well with either the Sundays in Advent, the O Antiphons, or characters/locations from the Nativity story. We will spray the outside of the boxes gold and purple and the girls will make a tiny shadow box inside and place a bible verse, description, quote or design on the left hand side. I will poke two holes in the top and thread gold ribbon through so they can be hung. It should be a new twist on our theme of opening the doors for Advent. Now it's off to find some spray paint. Check back next week as I hope to post pictures of our creations. Si ca marche. If it works :-)

-- Marjorie

PS - Thanks St. Gertrude!