Anyway today's service opportunity is one that just about everyone is capable of and that is smiling. It may seem silly and too simple to be a service but it brightens people's days to see a smiling face, it might even brighten yours. If you don't feel like smiling you can fake it 'til you make it. At an old job of mine I was quite often in a bad mood and so at someone's advice I worked on smiling anyway and I found that eventually my fake smile turned into a real one and I felt better about life. So smile!
As for something about Christmas I've been wondering about the origins of advent and advent calendars etc. At our house we've always had advent calenders at Christmas time to count down until Christmas, and I suppose that is really the explanation for them, counting down the days until Christmas.
Apparently the idea originated in German, a lot of our Christmas traditions seem to have come from Germany. I leaned a different spin on advent calenders when I took German in 8th grade; I'm used to calenders where you do something different each day to mark the passing of the day, we have one where you put ornaments on a tree and another where we move Mary and Joseph towards Bethlehem. The calender that I made in my German class was a wreath with four candles, starting the Sunday after Thanksgiving you light a candle each Sunday until Christmas. This has been a fun tradition for our family, we light the candles and read Christmas books while they burn.
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