Levavi
Today is Levavi, the first Sunday of Advent. In Christianity it is tradition that on this day you light up the first candle on your Advent wreath. I do not know much about the background of this time, just that it's the period of four Sundays leading up to the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.
Nevertheless, to light up a candle on a wreath you have to have a wreath at all. Last year I decided, that I did not want one of those off-the-shelf wrathes on my table. I thought a lot about how I'd like my wrath to be and look like and what I needed for building it myself. Eventually I ended up in a market garden where I explained my ideas and wishes to one of the gardeners there and told them which of the parts i their store I'd like to have used. After roughly half an hour I held a wreath in my hands which looked astonishingly similar to what I imagined before. Just for this reason alone I was happy to pay the hefty price tag. But it was softened by the knowledge, that a lot of the parts on it were reusable and that's what I did this year.
Yesterday I went shopping for candles and some branches. Candles were found fast but there were no tree-branches I liked so I decided to get some from the woods around my home. The better part of the afternoon was then filled with tinkering and building of the Advent wreath using imagination, the parts from last years wreath and hot glue. Altough it did not end up exactly as in my imagination, I think it's still quite nice :)