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The Advent and Christmas Devotions Shelf - Twenty-Five Days of Reading Toward the Manger
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items December deserves better reading than the catalog stack. This shelf runs the season properly: four weeks of Advent devotion, the story classics read aloud by the tree, and Bonhoeffer from a prison cell reminding everyone what the waiting is for.
Sections
3
Advent, Day by Day
Read by the Tree
The Deep End of December
Advent, Day by Day
The dated devotionals: Piper, Tripp, Ramsey's narrative, and Giglio.
John Piper's Dawning of Indestructible Joy gives twenty-five short December readings - dense, joyful, and built for the kitchen table. The Advent devotional for people who like their doctrine warm.
The Dawning of Indestructible Joy: Daily Readings for Advent, (Paperback)
Paul Tripp's Come, Let Us Adore Him walks parents through Advent with readings meaty enough for adults and steady enough for family ears. The gospel applied to December's actual chaos.
Come, Let Us Adore Him: A Daily Advent Devotional, (Hardcover)
Russ Ramsey's Advent of the Lamb of God retells the whole biblical story as one Advent narrative - twenty-five chapters from creation to Christ. The read-aloud that makes teenagers stay at the table.
Retelling the Story The Advent of the Lamb of God, (Paperback)
Louie Giglio's Waiting Here for You treats Advent as the season of holy waiting - short readings for the ones holding unanswered prayers into December. Gentle where the month is not.
Waiting Here for You: An Advent Journey of Hope
Read by the Tree
The story classics: a red bird, a fourth wise man, Tolkien's letters, and the Christmas box.
Fannie Flagg's A Redbird Christmas is the heart-warmer of the shelf - a man, a small Alabama town, a cardinal, and a little girl the town adopts. Read it in two evenings by the tree.
A Redbird Christmas : A Novel (Hardcover)
Henry van Dyke's Story of the Other Wise Man follows Artaban, the fourth magus who spent his gifts on the suffering and arrived thirty years late. A Christmas classic since 1895, and it earns every year of that.
The Story of the Other Wise Man (Paperback)
Tolkien's Letters from Father Christmas gathers the illustrated letters he wrote his children across twenty years - the author as dad, world-building at the kitchen table. A family treasure in facsimile.
Letters from Father Christmas (Paperback)
Richard Paul Evans's The Christmas Box is the little novel that launched a genre - a young family, an elderly widow, and what Christmas is actually for. Keep tissues in the same room as this book.
The Christmas Box, (Paperback)
The Deep End of December
An anthology, a prisoner, and the women of the story.
Watch for the Light gathers fifty readings from the great cloud - Lewis, Bonhoeffer, Merton, L'Engle - one voice a day from late November to Epiphany. The Advent anthology serious readers keep.
Plough Daily Devotionals Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas, (Hardcover)
God Is in the Manger collects Bonhoeffer's Advent and Christmas writings, much of it from prison - waiting, mystery, and joy under a locked door. The deepest December reading on this shelf.
God Is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas, (Paperback)
Liz Curtis Higgs's Women of Christmas walks Elizabeth, Mary, and Anna through the story at reading pace - Scripture open beside it, as Higgs always insists. The women's class Advent study of choice.
The Women of Christmas: Experience the Season Afresh with Elizabeth, Mary, and Anna (Hardcover)