redeeming the season

Putting up our tree this weekend, we were reflecting on why we didn't put up a tree in our house last year. It tooks us a minute to remember that last year we were out of a home. Yuck! But it was nice that some of that pain is going away, slowly. This year I've been about the business of purposefully being happy about Christmas. Working hard on appreciating where we are, being thankful for the road getting here, and looking forward to what is in store for us. I've been working on a daily scrapbook and we're having advent with @ every evening- mostly that means reading about the christmas story in a lot of different board books. I've never really celebrated advent before and so I don't entirely know what all is to be done. Perhaps I'll get to working on that at some point too. Anybody have advent wisdom you'd like to share? No regrets this season, so it doesn't matter if I start late.