We invite you back on the journey this Advent with seminarians Dylan and Gabriel as they help us get our hearts ready for the joy of Jesus’ birth. This week, they build and decorate a gingerbread house and chat about the fun family traditions that made their homes feel like Christmas growing up. We would love to hear about your favourite Christmas traditions and how you prepare your home for Jesus.
Transcript
Welcome back everyone, I’m Dylan. I’m Gabriel. We’re fifth year seminarians at Holy Spirit Seminary. And for the second week of Advent, we thought we would do gingerbread houses. So I’ve never done one of these, Gabriel. Have you ever, you’ve never built a gingerbread house before? All brand new. Now I have done two years of civil engineering at university, so I think it gives me a bit of an edge. That is unfair! We’ve got a lot of different decorating things here. What are they, Dylan? I recognise M&M’s. I recognise jelly beans. These look cool! This one looks like a little Christmas tree. I think it looks not as good as our Christmas tree. No. No. That’s for sure. That’s for sure. But look, they look like stars, actually, not going to lie. That’s cool, yeah. All right. And we’ve got lollies. And we have musks guys, we have musks. We’ve got all the good stuff to hold up our house. Oh, you can build an old Queenslander with these! You can prop them up and, nah, that’s not going to work. That’d be very cool. The Holy Spirit reminded me, Dylan, before we got started, to actually read the instructions. Lay it flat on a surface, quickly position it on the tray, put the icing on it. I reckon we can do this, Gabriel. I reckon between the two of us, we can figure out how to build a gingerbread house. I like it. It’s pretty good. That’s pretty good. That’s what step one done. I think we’re doing pretty well. We’ve got the main four walls of the house up. Okay, that’s progress, I think that’s how you actually have to build the house. I’m no builder, but I reckon this house is pretty all right. When did your house become a Christmas house? Like at what point during Advent? We’re in week two of Advent now. Yeah. So, like is the tree up yet? No, we were really the nine days before Christmas type people. Oh, I see, yeah. We’d start decorating during that O Antiphon period. That’s where you really got into the spirit of it all. Because I think up until that point, like all these weeks of Advent, at least in my family, it was that focus on the second coming, like this preparation for Christ’s return as well. Honestly, as a kid, I think we had a really good balance between the preparation for Christ’s second coming and also for the actual birth of Christ himself. We were a big Christmas family, so December 1st. Straight away. Christmas stuff starts coming out, but it came in waves. Wave one. You’ve got wave one was mum would get the boxes down out of the roof. Wave two. The boxes were full of the kid drawings, the little ceramic angel, you know, like the little things all the kids had made. Yep. yep. And she would have us put them all up. So, that was always fun. So, our house would kind of start looking like my house is now, I suppose, where you like, you just start putting all the decorations out. And then the tree would go up. The tree was always kept somewhere else, like at grandparents house. So it was sort of like when dad went to get the tree, that was exciting. Because mum would always be like, “When are you getting the tree? Why can’t we get the tree today?” Yeah, okay. She loved Christmas. So that was always cool. It was like a progressive decoration. So every couple weeks you get another thing up. And by the end of it, your house would just, the house was just covered in Christmas, Christmas stuff. Wow. That is pretty full out. Yeah, and it stayed up like, I don’t think mum knew she was keeping it up till Epiphany, but she was, she was definitely keeping it up for ages. Yep. Because Christmas was fun. Now I’ve sort of learnt, that’s the beauty of Advent. Yep. To treat it almost like a mini Lent in a sense. Not just preparing the house for decorating or not just buying the presents, but how is your soul getting prepared for Christ himself to come? I’m losing bits in my house. Oh wait, that is mayhem! You can tell Gabriel and I are very different people. An insight into our brains. I’m just decking it out. Look for something that was very, that had completely no order in it, you’ve managed to clean it up a bit. Trust the process they say. I think we’re at a stage Dylan, where the house is pretty much done. I think so, Gabriel. Final touches. My gingerbread house is done. Gabriel’s got a lot of thought in his, like everything Gabriel does, got a lot of thought. I like he’s got little faces on this side. I’ve made a little cross on this side. Which fell apart, so I put a musk stick there instead. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. A festive house, better than a manger. Better than like a filthy stable. Folks, which one has it? Who wins? The nice attempt at being ordered, or the order that came through the chaos? Chaos! Christmas and Advent are all about God’s chaotic amazing plan for us. That’s why my house should win. Oh, that’s a good little sell. The reason that Jesus came into this world wasn’t just to be a baby, but to be our savior. So, my house reminds us of that fact. Thank you guys for joining us as we built our gingerbread houses. Let us know which ones you reckon look the best. Which ones might be tastier than the other. And we hope that you might be able to do something like this yourselves. Get the kids around and try and talk to them in the same way we’ve been trying to talk to each other on what Christmas traditions are their favorite in your family, what they enjoy doing, what they see Christmas is about, how they’re using Advent to prepare themselves. Yeah, and we’ve built our little houses here and second week of Advent, it’s time to start putting the decorations up. It’s time to put up the tree, it’s time to get your house looking as good as mine. You can settle for Gabriel’s if you want. I’ll let that slide. It’s time to get our houses ready for Christmas. That’s true. Second week of Advent. Let’s go. Yep. Yep. Physical preparation, spiritual preparation. Wish you the best. Happy Advent. God bless.