Advent Wreaths- The Ultimate Resource List For Families!

An Advent wreath is a beautiful tradition and a great way to start living the liturgical year with your family! In fact, it’s on my top 15 list of ways to get started living the liturgical year at home! Incorporating fun advent wreath crafts, traditions, and activities with your kids can help them to learn about the season in a fun and hands on way. We love to have Advent wreath traditions such as making crafts, coloring our own Advent candles, singing songs, saying certain prayers, and even more! I am so excited to share these ideas and more with you today! 

The Advent wreath counts down the weeks until Christmas- one candle for each Sunday in Advent. Each week you add another candle that is being lit until finally all 4 are being lit! Then it’s almost time for Christmas! This is so great for kids as I find that countdowns are very fun for them! 

You can read my post on Advent Wreaths 101 here! The post includes:

  • Advent wreath traditions
  • What the wreath symbolizes
  • Why we use the colors we do
  • What each candle represents
  • What order to light the candles
  • Where to find candles in the correct colors
  • Pretty much everything you need to know about Advent wreaths! 

Printable Advent Wreath Countdown

I have this new Advent wreath countdown calendar that is printable, so it’s super easy and fun for any age group! It can print in color or in black and white so it’s a coloring page for the kids. There is one holly leaf for each day of Advent, and the way this printable is set up, it works for every single year and you only need the download once. 

This is a great option for RE classes at a Catholic church. You can easily print these for all of your kids! So if you are a DRE and you are looking for a way to incorporate the liturgical year in these kids homes, this is a super easy and cost-effective way to put an “Advent Wreath” in every parish home! When you print the coloring page version, the kids can “light” the candle themselves on the correct Sunday in Advent by coloring in the flame. Easy and effective!

Advent Wreath Crafts For Kids

I like to make Advent wreath crafts with kids during this time of the year so they can have their own personal Advent wreath. It also helps them remember the symbolism behind the wreath, remember the colors of the candles, etc when they have actually made one themselves. 

In the past, I have made this functioning advent wreath craft with my preschool class. It is a light-able Advent wreath craft, and has pink and purple birthday cake candles so that the Advent wreath craft can actually function at home. I can’t tell you how many families took this home, used it as their Advent wreath for the first time, and told me later that that started their family tradition of them having an Advent wreath every year! These things WORK, and when you take the time to make these crafts with kids you are changing lives. 

This easy handprint Advent wreath craft is a part of my printable book “Holidays In Handprints” for kids. I fully recommend this for the Advent season, and it becomes a keepsake over the years! In this download, kids create their own Christmas treasury by illustrating it with handprints. Full directions for completing the illustrations are included. 

The Holidays In Handprints includes not only the Advent wreath blessing (shown above) but also the Advent song with another handprint craft of the Advent wreath.

Also, you can find my round up of over 15 Advent wreath crafts for kids here!

Post continues after this brief information about the Catholic Icing Monthly Membership


Monthly Liturgical Membership

Catholic Liturgical Monthly Membership

Perfect for families! Each month you gain access to printable activity pages, crafts, home altar pieces, and more.
 
Never has living the liturgical year been so easy and affordable!
 

I also have a free how to draw an Advent wreath video, so now your kids can draw their own! It’s also available as a free printable coloring page.

Make Your Own Pink And Purple Advent Wreath Candles

Crafting your own candles can be a really fun Advent tradition and a great way to get kids involved with a great Advent activity this year!

I have a super fun project where you melt pink and purple candles down cheap white pillar candles. This is fun, easy, and the results are beautiful! I have some good directions to melt the crayons over the candles here so you don’t end up with a mess. 

In this article I show you how to paint your own pillar candles pink and purple using melted crayons. The reason I love this so much is because pink and purple pillar candles are so expensive, but you can get cheap white ones at the Dollar Tree. So you can save like, $20 doing this yourself, and plus, you don’t have to go searching for the right colors.

We have also made our own DIY Advent candles by getting the kits where you roll the bee’s wax yourselves. This is another fun activity and it really doesn’t get any easier than this! My kids loved this one. 

More Catholic Advent Activities For Families

You can find my list of Advent blessings for families, including a blessing for your home Advent wreath here.

Be sure to check out this Advent song for kids! Super cute, easy to sing, and it has hand motions! A simple way to get the true meaning of Advent across to the little ones. 🙂

the advent song

I hope you found some great resources for utilizing an Advent wreath with your family this year!

You can find all of my Advent and Christmas posts here!

The Advent Christmas Planner- available from Catholic Icing

Comments

  1. Hi Lacy,
    Hope you had a wonderful thanksgiving! Thank you for all the wonderful ideas. I love your blog and your Advent and Christmas planner is awesome!! I am loving it.
    Cynthia

  2. Where did you find the purple and pink birthday candles? I wanted to make advent wreaths out of clay with my class, but I couldn’t find the candles and checked so many stores!

  3. Hi! The functional advent wreath with birthday candles link just sends you back to this blog post. Do you have directions for it? Or, what is the “wreath” base made out of?