How To Have a Christ-Centered Advent With Family This Year

Christmas is coming! And if you’re looking for some fun ways to get your toddler, preschooler, or kids excited about the season of Advent, while also making sure they know the TRUE meaning, then you’ve come to the right place.

Here are some simple and easy ideas that will help make this Christmas Christ-centered for your family!

How To Have a Christ-Centered Advent for Toddlers

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While the crisp cold air, warm jammies, and cozy nights are all great, it’s so important as Christian parents to make sure our kids NEVER lose the true meaning of Christmas.

How do we do this?

By making sure that everything we do this season points back to Jesus, and it starts with us as parents living it out and teaching our kids more about God.

That is why I put together some fun ideas to make advent for your toddlers meaningful and point to Jesus!

But first, how do we explain advent to toddlers? I’m glad you asked!

How Do You Explain Advent to Toddlers?

Advent is the time before Christmas (4 weeks) that we prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus! We do this by praying, participating in advent activities, and making sure we keep on focusing on CHRIST at Christmas. 🙂

Advent starts on December 1st and ends on Christmas Eve. You can explain this to your child by talking about how each day that goes by counts down the days until Christmas!

The best way to explain advent to your toddler is to create your own advent calendar and fill it with Christ-centered activities. This leads to my first point…

Put Together an Advent Calendar:

This is definitely the MOST practical thing you can do, and follow it each season! Kids are visual learners, so this will definitely help with explaining what advent is and why we do these things leading up to Christmas.

There are so many fun advent calendars out there that you can choose from, but if you’re looking for something more Christ-centered this year, then I would suggest creating one of your own!

I’ve also got a great list of over 50 advent activities for toddlers and kids that you can fill your own advent calendar with.

You can start your calendar on December 1st and have a different activity or prayer for each day leading up to Christmas. Fill it with fun activities, crafts, baking, prayers, Bible stories, etc…. anything to make sure you are keeping Christ in Christmas. 🙂

Grab the full list of over 50+ advent activities here!

Set Out A Play Nativity Scene

Growing up my parents always had a beautiful nativity scene set out, so we could visually see the nativity story and ask questions about the birth of Jesus.

Something we did for our daughter was to buy a “kids” nativity scene! She can play with this, and put together the scene while asking questions about Jesus.

You could even read the story and have them bring each person/persons into the scene as they appear in the story (shepherds, wise men, animals, etc.) and end with baby Jesus in his manger.

Set this out in your living room, their bedroom, or toy room, somewhere they will see it throughout the day and keep advent on their minds.

Here is a super cute wooden block nativity set for kids and also the Little Nativity Set from fisher price!

If you want to make it even more interactive and fun, get these plain wooden nativity blocks here and paint them together with your kids!

Read Christmas Books About Jesus

As much as cute penguin and snowman books are fun to read (and yes we read those too!), this is a great way to help teach our toddlers about advent!

Reading in and of itself is so great for kids, so you might as well read to them about Jesus too. Anything to make sure they know why we celebrate Christmas as believers!

We have some of our favorite Christmas books about Jesus, that my daughter knows when we read them, Christmas time is near! Our personal favorite Christmas book to read is “God Gave Us Christmas.”

Here are some of our favorite Christ-Centered Christmas books for toddlers and kids!

Listen To Songs and Movies About Jesus’ Birth

I love Christmas carols as much as the next person, but there are so many Christmas songs that praise and worship Jesus. Play these in your house and make them just as popular as the classics!

Here are some of our favorite worship songs about Christmas:

O Holy Night – Kim Walker Smith
Noel – Lauren Daigle
Hoy To The World – Chris Tomlin
What Child Is This – Chris Tomlin, All Sons & Daughters
The First Noel – Phil Wickham
I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day – Casting Crowns
When Hope Came Down – Kari Jobe

You can check these songs above PLUS over 100 more praise & worship songs about Jesus and Christmas!

The same goes for movies as well! Enjoy a fun family movie night with popcorn, a cozy blanket, and play a Christmas movie that points your kids back to Jesus.

Two great movies that explain the story of Jesus’ birth for families are The Nativity Story and The Star.

Participate in Christ-Centered Advent Activities

What better way to get toddlers excited about Christmas and Jesus than making fun crafts with them! Hands-on activities are great for toddlers because they are fun, interactive and will help them remember the true meaning of Christmas.

We did this fun, fingerprint “lights” craft last year and wrote a faith saying on it! It was so much fun and my daughter still talks about it to this day.

Check out the step-by-step instructions for the “Joy to the World” craft here!

Other advent activities include making baby Jesus crafts, homemade ornaments, painting wood nativity blocks, any type of craft that has to do with keeping Christ in Christmas…

In fact, I created an ultimate guide to filling your calendar with some of the best advent activities for toddlers including games, crafts, printables, baking treats, and more!

Celebrate Advent in The Kitchen

Christmas is the perfect time for baking lots of treats, right? Why not make those yummy treats point back to Jesus!

Bake some homemade Christmas sugar cookies and icing (here’s an easy recipe here) using fun nativity cookie cutters, or even make a Happy Birthday Jesus cake.

This is also a great way to make some priceless memories with your family. My daughter, myself, and my mom do this every year together, usually a week or so before Christmas.

I have pictures of my daughter will flour on her face and icing all over her mouth, and I hope she cherishes these memories as she grows up!

You can even wrap some of the treats you bake up in plastic wrap and then gift them away to neighbors, Sunday school teachers, homeless shelters, or all of the above. It could be a weekly thing you do in December!

Donate Old Toys

We always like to donate old toys before Christmas. My daughter plays with them all year and there’s a good chance that they’re not going to get played with anymore, so why not give them away?

It’s a great way to teach toddlers about giving, and that God gave us the best gift anyone can ever receive… Jesus!

Christmas isn’t about the gifts we give, but the One we received.

Plus, it creates more room for the toys they will inevitably get from grandparents, right??

Read About Jesus’ Birth In The Bible

Advent is about waiting, and what better way to spend the season than by reading about Jesus’ birth in the Bible? Skip out on Santa Claus and focus on Jesus instead!

Even though we should be reading about Jesus’ birth throughout the year, it’s especially important leading up to Christmas. We like to read the story in the Gospel of Luke!

You can read a chapter a day up until Christmas, or read it together as a family on Christmas Eve and have a time of prayer and thanksgiving for Jesus’ birth!

If you want a super-focused list of scriptures to read through, follow along with the legend of the candy cane poem. 🙂

I hope these tips help you to make sure you have a meaningful advent for toddlers, and your family grows closer together and to God!

Which tip will you be incorporating this advent season? Let me know in the comments!