Lift Up Your Hearts
Advent, Christmas & Epiphany Resources

Peace, friends!

The following selected sites offer worthwhile, ecumenically accessible Advent, Christmas and Epiphany resources. Most links lead to devotional possibilities --Advent calendars, family prayer guides, and the like. A few sites offer liturgical helps or rites. We especially emphasize sites and resources which seek to embrace children in the worship and devotional life of the church. The seasonal resources represented here are additional to the regular liturgical, preaching and devotional material found elsewhere at Lift Up Your Hearts.

This collection of online resources is renewed each fall. New links are added while dated resources and stale sites are culled. We would be grateful to hear of any sites of which we should take note. Did we miss something last year? Let us know! Got a new site for this year? Drop us a line! Contact Wendell Grahlman [e-mail] to suggest possible links.

Please note that some resources do/will not appear online until the very beginning of Advent.

The maple leaf indicates a Canadian connection.

Advent

• Want to focus on social responsibility? You might visit Buy Nothing Christmas, a Canadian project with Mennonite roots.

• As families and communities contemplate their observance of Advent and eventual celebration of CHristmas, they might do well to consider the ecumenical Alternatives for Simple Living of Sioux City, Iowa. Look for their archive which includes resources for Advent and Christmas.
• ELCA pastor Thomas Weitzel of Largo, Florida, maintains a helpful Liturgy site offering original services, worship ideas and articles related to worship and spirituality. Look to his Advent & Christmas Directory for a number of nice items.
• St. Margaret Mary Parish, Naperville, Illinois, has produced a nice Advent calendar.
• Grace Episcopal Cathedral, San Fransisco, California, offers an interesting multi-media Advent Calendar.
• St. Luke's Episcopal Church, Durham, NC, has a page Just For Kids.
• Children Pray: Advent and Christmas is a devotional offering by Victor Hoagland.
• Barbara Laufersweiler of Faith at Home, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, offers a number of Advent home resources.
• Look to Fridge Art for Advent family-centred activities.
• Frank Logue of King of Peace Episcopal Church, Kingsland, Georgia, has prepared Celebrating Advent in the Home in PDF. See their Advent page as well as their lovely Resources and Making Room for Kids pages.
• Father Jim Irvine, Canon of Christ Church Cathedral in the Diocese of Fredericton, New Brunswick, offers a page of Advent, Christmas & Epiphany resources entitled Festivals of Light.
• Father Ronald Vierling, a.k.a. "The Internet Padre," offers Keeping Christ in Christmas: A Catholic Resource for the Advent and Christmas Seasons.
• The Reformed Church in America offers a variety of Resources for Advent.
• The community at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia (ELCA) offers some helpful Resources for Congregational Use including nice Advent devotions.
• The people at Lutheran Hour Ministries have created a site of Devotions covering the whole of Advent and Christmas.
• The Church of the Nazarene's Dennis Bratcher has nice material on the Season of Advent including a Jesse Tree.
• French-speaking friends might appreciate Franziska Santschi-Geiser's Le Calendrier de l'Avent.
• In the secular world, at Advent-Calendars.Com, Penelope Schenk offers a yearly Advent calendar with a lovely story line and terrific, animated illustrations. A nice bit of fun!
• Helen McLoughlin has produced a text-only page of Family Advent Customs based on the book of the same title.
• Raymond Bucko has published an Advent Novena featuring some William McNichols icons.
• The ELCA worship people offer a collection of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany resources.
• The General Board of Discipleship of the United Methodist Church offers a large collection of resources for Advent.

Christmas

• Look to Fridge Art for Christmas family-centred activities.
• ELCA pastor Thomas Weitzel of Largo, Florida, maintains a helpful Liturgy site offering original services, worship ideas and articles related to worship and spirituality. Look to his Advent & Christmas Directory for a number of nice items.
• For a little Christmas Canadiana, see Barbara Simpson et al's Story of The Huron Carol.
• Children Pray: Advent and Christmas is a devotional offering by Victor Hoagland.
• Father Ronald Vierling, a.k.a. "The Internet Padre," offers Keeping Christ in Christmas: A Catholic Resource for the Advent and Christmas Seasons.
• Barbara Laufersweiler of Faith at Home, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, offers a number of Christmas home resources.
• Frank Petersohn of Sechelt, British Columbia, offers texts and music files of Christmas Songs (Weihnachtslieder).
• The people at Lutheran Hour Ministries have created a site of Devotions covering the whole of Advent and Christmas.
• The Church of the Nazarene's Dennis Bratcher has this thoughtful piece on the Twelve Days of Christmas.
• Dave Hurlbert of St. Gregory of Nyssa, San Francisco, California, has written the script for a nice Christmas Pageant.
• The Reformed Church in America offers a variety of Resources for Christmas.
• The Anglican Church of Canada's Diocese of Ottawa offers a couple of liturgical celebrations of a Blue Christmas for communities wherein people are grieving the loss of loved-ones or serve people who are otherwise suffering.
• The ELCA worship people offer a collection of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany resources.
• The General Board of Discipleship of the United Methodist Church offers a terrific collection of resources for Christmas.

Epiphany

• Here at Lift Up Your Hearts, you'll find Chalking the Door, a home liturgy to celebrate the Epiphany of Our Lord.
• ELCA pastor Thomas Weitzel of Largo, Florida, maintains a helpful Liturgy site offering original services, worship ideas and articles related to worship and spirituality. Look to his Epiphany Directory for a number of nice items.
• The Church of the Nazarene's Dennis Bratcher offers a little bit about the Epiphany Season.
• Dean McIntyre offers An Epiphany Blessing of Homes and Chalking the Door.
• James Irvine, (Anglican) Diocese of Fredericton, New Brunswick, offers an interesting Home Study for Advent/Epiphany on Gary Smith's Radical Compassion: Finding Jesus in the Heart of the Poor. Other fascinating home studies are based on works of Spong, Borg, Kushner, Yancey and others. (Note that the site is being rebuilt from scratch and some internal links may not work. Just give Fr. Jim a shout!)
• Reflecting the realities of an earlier age, the Catholic Liturgical Library offers a Proclamation of the Date of Easter at Epiphany from the 1970 Roman Missal.
• Barbara Laufersweiler of Faith at Home, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, offers some Epiphany home resources.
• The ELCA worship people offer a collection of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany resources.
• The General Board of Discipleship of the United Methodist Church offers Articles and Resources for Epiphany.
• The Reformed Church in America offers a variety of Resources for Epiphany.

Catalogues of Links and Resources

A few sites offer significant collections of helpful links.

• Consider the work of our friends at Anglicans Online who maintain excellent Resources for Advent and Epiphany Traditions pages.
• The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America offers worship planning materials for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany.
• Jenee Woodard offers Advent, Christmas and Epiphany pages at TextWeek, one of the most helpful Lectionary resources sites on the Web.
• Tim Muth of Saint John's Lutheran Church, Brookfield, Wisconsin, has long offered a page called A Religious Christmas with many helpful items and many off-site links.
• Consider the myriad Advent, Christmas and Epiphany possibilities at Richard and Charlene Fairchild's long-standing A Holy Christmas.

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