Advent 2013 (Updated!)

This past Advent and Christmas season is what prompted me to start this blog.  It was my first major event in my new position and not only was I pleased with how the sanctuary looked, I received many positive comments complementing the environment we created.  

Advent:  In previous years the Visual Arts Team spent the weekend after Thanksgiving putting up trees, lights, wreaths and all the Christmas decorations you could imagine.  They would then be up for almost 2 months and be taken down mid to late January.  To be honest, by the time Christmas came we were used to the way things looked and the trees began to disappear.  The issue that was created came in the form of Advent and it's meaning.  The weeks leading up to Christmas is a time to wait and anticipate the coming of the Christ child, and here we were opening the gift of a beautifully decorated worship space almost a month early.  

Our goal was to visually create a sense of anticipation and excitement for the coming of Christmas.  We started with birch trees.

We bought 10 medium birch trees from a local tree farm and
placed them on the back wall behind the altar. 

We used 5 gallon buckets filled with sand to keep them standing.

The bareness of the sanctuary was essential to create the idea of anticipation.  We borrowed the idea from the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis.

We covered the buckets with blue cloth had a slight shimmer to it.  The idea was to bring in the liturgical colors and use them to hide power cords and the lights.

We repositioned them for the children's musical.  We also
had blue wash lighting as well as white up lights to accentuate
the trees and brick.

The children's musical had their own staging but we wanted to keep consistency of the season by using them to flank the backdrop. It also made for a wonderful background for the manger scene. 

The trees were also used in our gathering area at the main entrance to the sanctuary.

Lighting:  This was the most essential part of making the trees work.  We have a tan brick wall that is textured and the "thinness" of the branches were easily lost.  The key was the up lighting used to differentiate the trees from the wall.  

I used 5 Chauvet COLORstrips  to throw a blue wash on the wall behind the trees.  This gave the wall more texture and depth.  

I then needed more light on the trees themselves and I achieved the desired look by attaching 1 Ikea LAGRA light to the base of the tree.

The hardest thing about the Christmas season is waiting.  But no matter what we think about the length of time it always seems to take what seems like forever for Christmas Eve and Day to arrive.  The last thing we wanted was people to feel like Christmas arrived the same time all the sales and music in the department stores did.  Advent was spent focusing on how we prepare our hearts for baby Jesus. Personally it made the stories leading up to the birth story come to life more.

This was our foundation to our Christmas decorations.  And I will talk about that in the next post. Thanks for reading. 

Update!

I found the pictures of just the birch trees!  Enjoy.

The trees were lined up against the back wall so as to not take up too much space.

This corner provided a great backdrop to the Advent wreath.

Wide shot of the chancel area.  Notice the alternating white and blue lights.