Advent Poetry Teatime Resources

Adding a poetry teatime to your week is such a lovely way to add some beauty to your week. We always like to find our favorite seasonal Holiday teas. We especially love Celestial Seasonings Sugar Cookie Sleigh Ride and Sugar Plum Spice at Christmas. I baked some cranberry bread from our leftover cranberry orange relish from Thanksgiving. Score for frugality! We carried our advent wreath out to the porch to enjoy a bit of sunshine.

For our special advent tea, I checked out all the Christmas poetry books at our library to find some that included religious poetry that I liked. My favorite was The Young Oxford Book of Christmas Poetry.

I also read from A Christmas Anthology of Poetry and Painting edited by Vivian Campbell, a vintage book my husband found at a used bookstore. We have been talking about the Renaissance lately, and this volume had lots of pictures of Renaissance art.

He also bought me a copy of poet Malcolm Guite's poetry anthology Waiting on the Word. Malcolm Guite is a British vicar, poet, musician and C.S. Lewis scholar, who also happens to look and sound an awful lot like a Hobbit. In this advent devotional, he has collected a poem a day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. He is also posting each poem on his blog during advent with a link to him reading it and artwork by Linda Richardson.

If you don't have time to track down these books, you can also find some wonderful poetry each day as part of the The Advent Project at Biola University. 

I have been loving this online advent calendar for my own personal devotions. Each day a new square pops up with a piece of artwork or video, a musical selection, a Bible reading, a piece of poetry, and a devotion. I have been sharing bits of this with the kids as well and they love it.

It was through The Advent Project on December 1 that we discovered this wonderful poem by our local, world-famous poet, and also Amherst College-alum, Richard Wilbur, called The Christmas Hymn. You can hear him read it here.

Enjoy some tea and poetry this advent!