Waiting for Christmas

Book excerpt: Little children throughout the world wait impatiently for Christmas to arrive. As parents know, it can seem as if the days just crawl by. Now your family can learn and put to use Advent traditions from the country of Germany during the Christmas season. No doubt mothers have long been inventing ways to keep young children occupied during the Advent season—like Gerhard Lang’s mother, who in the mid-1800s helped her young son count the days on a calendar of cookies. In 1908, the grownup Gerhard, a printer, created the first commercial Advent calendar, twenty-four tiny pictures in the form of a calendar, from his fond memories. Waiting for Christmas tells the story of the young Gerhard—a story children everywhere will recognize as their own—and teaches us that we must wait patiently as we prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus.