Twelve Plus One Tiger Christmas Tales: Part 2

Advent

Date: 31 November 2014 – 24 December 2014

Gift: Advent Calendar

Price: R70 – R170, depending on whether or not Lindt made the chocolate in your advent calendar

Food: HotButtered Rum and the chocolate from your advent calendar

Saint: Andrew the Apostle

Scripture: John 1 (you can get a free copy of the English Standard Version Bible on Kindle)

Activity: Preparation

A large part of the excitement of Christmas is the preparation time leading up to it.  Putting up and decorating of the tree, baking cookies and fruit cakes, singing carols and shopping for gifts in the festively decorated stores.  Retailers are particularly fond of promoting certain gifts as appropriate for each of the Twelve Days of Christmas.  All of this leads up to the wonderful day filled with strewn wrapping paper and stuffed stomachs… and then it’s all over.

Twelve Plus One Tiger Christmas Tales: Part 1

Advent and the Twelve Days of Christmas

Grinch Alert: This post and the ones to follow is all about Christmas. Proceed with caution!

Most humans love to fill their lives with traditions and stories - whether they’re passed on from ancestors, great grandparents, or new creations. Stories about how things came to be the way they are or about significant events and how we remember them. Consider any dinner party and you’ll find it stays alive through an exchange of stories – picking up an element from one and adding your own story containing said element. The conversation often lands up in a complete different place to where it started without someone having drastically altered the direction.

One particular story filled to the brim with traditions, and growing variants every time it comes around, is the story of how Christmas came to be. From the pagan solstice festivals, Yule logs and gifts, to the birth of Jesus, Midnight Mass and turkeys; Christmas has become a jolly old mix of religions and cultures, as well as the cause for much controversy, cheer and charity.

It’s the cheer and charity of it I'll be focusing on in Twelve Plus One Tiger Christmas Tales from now until the 5^th of January, also known as the Twelfth Day of Christmas.