Don’t bother telling me it’s too early to think about Christmas Eve. As an ordained minister (though not one serving a parish) I know Christmas needs to be planned well in advance. And while the ideas I’ll be blogging about are not (for me) actionable, they’re not too early. I do hope they’re useful for a stressed small-church leader, lay or ordained.
For one: the 5-pound bag of clementines you can get at Trader Joe’s (at least in Washington, D.C.) has 61 of the little citrus fruit in it. For refreshment planning. But I’m also thinking about the service…
…and they are good for decor. I was serving a small church where we nested clementines in the whorls of the church’s decorative (indoor) window-sill greenery. It was an inexpensive upgrade to our tired fake greens, and it looked very festive. And the clementines stayed reasonably intact from the 4th Sunday of Advent, through the first Sunday after Christmas. I’ve also seen a church do something simmilar with a sack of pomegranates, which evidently lasted through the entire Advent-Christmas season, but which required wires to hold them in place.