>The Advent wreath started out pretty much as the Christmas equivalent to the “When do we get there?” chorus from the kids as soon as you leave the driveway on a trip to just about anywhere.

Johann Wichern founded a home for underprivileged children in Hamburg in the 19th century.

Wikipedia sez:

During the Advent season, the children would ask daily if Christmas had arrived. In 1839, he built a wooden ring (made out of a cartwheel) with 19 small red and 4 big white candles. A small candle was lit successively every day of Advent. On Sundays, a large white candle was lit. This eventually led to the modern Advent wreath with its four candles.

Big tradition developed over here and spread pretty much all over.

Ours is a bit different this year.

Uwe Rumeney from Ars Ligni is a carpenter mate of Frank the Potter and specialises in rescuing and/or recycling half-timbered houses that are scheduled for demolition or are just crumbling away from lack of TLC. (He’s pretty famous, actually)

Frank the Potter buys odds and sods from him and uses them to frame tile compositions and he came up with the idea of making

You take an flat offcut from a beam, sand-blast it, drill 4 shallow equidistant holes, make flat candle holders with a nub that fits the hole in the board, pop in some quality candles and there you do just go.

Not quite the traditional sort, but cool as all get-out.

4th candle gets lit on Sunday.

21 Dec This entry was published on 21 December, 2007 at 19:02. It’s filed under Mainz and tagged Advent wreath, arls ligni, frank jung, uwe rumeney. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.