Advent begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas – this year it falls on Sunday 29th November, or the evening of the 28th if you start with the vigil.

The Advent calendars and candles you can buy in shops always start on 1st December. But if you want a candle that actually lasts right through advent, you’ll need to make your own.

Take a tall, slender candle – a 12″ dinner candle is ideal. The symbolic colours are purple for Advent, symbolising fasting and preparation, or white for the revelation of Christ. (You can get red ones too,but I think that’s just because it’s christmassy)

Then take a ruler and felt tip pen. Start about an inch from the bottom so there’s enough candle to stand up. Then mark all the way up the candle, twenty-six evenly spaced segments.

You can then simply use your felt tip pen to mark the dates (starting at the top) 29, 30, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., all the way to 24 at the bottom

If you want to make your candle very beautiful you could cut a tiny notch at each place and mark with gold paint, although be warned that it tends to sizzle slightly when it burns.

You then choose a time every day when you can burn one segment. A slender candle takes 10-20 minutes, depending on the length, width and quality of wax.

What to do while the candle burns? You might like to make a family commitment to eat breakfast or dinner together while it burns. Or you could use the time to sit in silence, or read, or pray. Advent is traditionally a time of waiting: you could pray every day for a person or place that is waiting for news, or peace, or healing.

Steve Taylor suggested in the comments here praying every day for one place or person that needs blessing.

I once read a charming story about a child who cut off a section of the family advent candle because there was an emergency (something to do with a birth, I think) and he thought he could make time go faster by shortening the candle. Does anyone remember where the story comes from?

In a few days I’ll tell you how to make an Advent wreath.

Andy is a regular commenter here, and a firefighter, and he has added a comment below as a safety reminder, which seem especially important after the sad events of Bonfire night:  never leave candles burning unattended, and keep them out of the way of curtains and clothes. And if you have long hair, be very careful indeed around candles!

When my son was seven, I took him on his first trip to Paris. The first day we climbed a bit of the Eiffel Tower, and when we got back to ground level we stopped for a ride on the carousel. At that point in his life, he loved carousels more than anything. Each of the following three days, wherever we went in Paris we had to return via the Eiffel Tower so he could have another ride on the carousel. and a chocolate crepe from the van.

Today Eric posted this lovely picture of the carousel by night. Happy memories. 

THe BBC has a piece on how to "cope" with Christmas and not get into debt. "Make a budget and stick to it," it says, which is of course a smart idea.

But here's an even more radical idea: cut down your idea of what's required. The expectations we place on ourselves for Christmas, weddings and all sorts of other celebrations are completely out of hand: sure, if you are minted, enjoy it, but you do not have to spend seventeen grand on a wedding, or two grand on Christmas.

If you're on a tight budget, call your family and friends and tell them you're not doing presents this year, or only doing £5 presents, or whatever you can afford and invite them to do the same. (I just did that). They might even be very glad someoone else takes the initiative. And think realistically about what people really can eat in two or three days. Most families chuck out half a turkey a few days after Christmas (or they freeze it and then chuck it out six months later). Try buying an ordinary chicken instead, or two if there's a houseful. Four pounds buys enough carrots, parsnips and potatoes (especially if you shop at Aldi) to have roast veg for a week.

What do you really need to celebrate? Some warmth. Some friends. Enough to eat. Goodwill to all.

Lower expectations, cut out the stress, and raise the enjoyment factor.

7.30pm, Wednesday 10 May

Michaelhouse Centre, Trinity Street, Cambridge, CB2 1SU

Organizers: PCC, Great St Mary’s, Cambridge; Inclusive Church (Ely)

"…whatever thoughts you have about God, who He is or if He exists, most will agree that if there is a God, He has a special place for the poor. In fact, the poor are where God lives.
Check Judaism. Check Islam. Check pretty much anyone.

I mean, God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill. I hope so. He may well be with us as in all manner of controversial stuff. Maybe, maybe not. But the one thing we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor.

God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them. "If you remove the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness, and if you give yourself to the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then your light will rise in darkness and your gloom with become like midday and the Lord will continually guide you and satisfy your desire in scorched places."
It’s not a coincidence that in the scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It’s not an accident. That’s a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions. (You know, the only time Christ is judgmental is on the subject of the poor.) ‘As you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me’ (Matthew 25:40). As I say, good news to the poor."

Bono speaks to The National Prayer Breakfast (see more here)

The real issue in raising and teaching children is not WHETHER to teach them a world view, but thnking about what you are teaching them (both deliberately, and subliminally), about how to give them a sense of security yet also the freedom not to think in every way as you do, so as to extend and not limit their capacity to engage with the world. You have to measure carefully in order to give them both a sense of security and confidence in what they know, and that necessary degree of agnosticism required for any kind of genuine, honest enagement with the world. I teach my son both what I know, and also what I believe – but I also teach him that not everyone believes as we do. I teach him that widely accepted views (such as most of the science we "know") is always contingent, always subject to revision.  I teach him what I think – but I also try to teach him how to think. I give him the space to try out ideas that spill over the edge of what I believe, for the sake of allowing him to think and weigh and own the beliefs he grows up with. Recently he made friends with a child from a Jewish family, and said that we should pray only to God and not to Jesus – his reasoning being that he didn’t want to think he was "leaving his friend out" when we prayed. Rather than inisisting on our  "orthodoxy", I went along with it, taking it as an opportunity to teach him a bit about the common ideas and history of the two religions, and how to live constructively with people who agree with us on some things and disagree on others. We didn’t convert, we gained confidence both in the stability and the flexibility of our own faith.

Of course, I may decide 20 years from now that I got it wrong. But I think there is all the difference in the world between "indoctrination" and teaching about God and faith from within a religious viewpoint.

My son and I set about improving our record, by using the car less, eating less imported and processed food, turning the heating down, and a few other things. Eight months on, I find that my footprint has gone down – but only to 3.5, and we’d still need 1.9 planets to sustain a world full of people like me. More work required. 
What’s your ecological footprint?