Each year, people look forward to receiving this devotional Advent calendar, which includes daily Scripture readings, a suggested devotion, and a poem. Since its beginnings, it has been a collaborative project that I have created with my good friend Merry Watters. This year, 2024, marks the 35th anniversary of the calendar.
In 1988, I was serving as the pastor of the United Methodist Church in White River Junction, Vermont, and Merry was pastor of the Essex United Methodist Church in Essex, Vermont. On a visit to her home at the beginning of Advent, I noticed on her refrigerator a calendar she had created for her congregation. For each day of the season, she had selected a reading from the Bible, with a brief suggestion for an activity for the day. I asked if I could use it with members of my congregation, and took a copy home that day, adding a few decorative touches before reprinting it and distributing. That calendar, composed on a typewriter, provided the basic structure for all the calendars to follow. Unlike traditional calendars, which have 24 windows for each day in December, ours follows the liturgical calendar, and so always begins on the First Sunday of Advent.
The following year, we produced our first collaborative calendar, and Merry included a World Peace Prayer. The use of that prayer inspired me to compose a poem for the 1990 calendar, and a poem has been an essential part of every subsequent calendar. Some of these poems have been set to tunes to be sung during the Advent season. Check the page of poems for all of the poems from past calendars.
The 1990 calendar was also the first one that was distributed beyond our local congregations. All of the United Methodist Churches in the Troy Annual Conference, which included churches throughout Vermont, the Adirondacks, and the Capital Region of New York, received copies of the calendar. Within a few years, the calendar had become an important part of the Advent traditions of many churches.
Sandra Brands, who served as Troy Conference Communications Director, helped us to get the calendar online when the Conference developed its website, and she also helped it to find its way to places like the United Methodist Church’s Board of Global Missions and Board of Discipleship websites. This year, the calendar has been available through at least 7 different conference and institutional websites, along with many congregational websites.
Since its beginnings, we have always distributed the calendar free of charge, encouraging people to use it, reproduce it, and send it out into the world. We are delighted with the reception it has received, and hope to continue this tradition for years to come.