This book is for Christmas season 2015-2016. Each 24-hour day has 1,440 minutes. You’re asked to give six of those 1,440 minutes to prayer for the next 43 days. This Little Book will be your companion, and you can take it with you wherever you wish. You can write in it, tear out a page and put it in your pocket, get extra copies and mail them to friends or family members and have a sense of praying with them each day. The left-hand page is like a buffet table with a variety of thoughts about the Advent and Christmas seasons, the feast of the day, or various traditions and customs. The key is the right-hand page where we’ll reflect on the first reading assigned for the Mass each day. This will give many people a chance to reflect on and pray passages from the Old Testament that they may have seldom heard proclaimed or preached about at liturgy.

Each 24-hour day has 1,440 minutes. You’re asked to give six of those 1,440 minutes to prayer for the next 44 days. You can give more than six minutes if you wish. But the main thing is to pray every day. The left-hand page is like a buffet table with a variety of thoughts about the Advent and Christmas seasons, the feast of the day, or various traditions and customs. The key is the right-hand page. On that page each day (except Sundays), we’ll walk through the first part of Luke’s Gospel a little bit at a time.

This book is for Christmas season 2015-2015. This Little Book will be your companion, and you can take it with you wherever you wish. The left-hand page is like a buffet table with a variety of thoughts about the Advent and Christmas seasons, the feast of the day, or various traditions and customs. The key is the right-hand page where we’ll reflect on a Gospel passage. This year, the Little Blue Book will use the Gospel passages assigned for the weekday Masses of these seasons. This will give many people a chance to reflect on and pray passages from all of the Gospels that they may have seldom heard proclaimed or preached about at liturgy.

Six minutes a day. That’s what you’re asked to give during these next 43 days – the 26 days of the Advent season, and the 17 days of the Christmas season. Each 24-hour day has 240 “six minute” packages. During the Advent and Christmas seasons, you’re asked to give one of those to the Lord.

The Course of Our Seasons is filled with angelic messages that await only our awareness. Even the mundane is rendered sacred in the fullness of love's journey. Brilliant, sensitive, accessible... Dr. Jim Young, AWARE IN A WORLD ASLEEP The tilt of the earth, rustle of angel wings and the hush of a lullaby bring the reader into The Course of Our Seasons. Kathleen Gresham Everett allows us glimpses into the seasons of our natural world, our spiritual world and the world of our emotions through her evocative and thoughtful poetry. The inspiration is specific and universal - birth, life, death and ultimately, rebirth. The book begins with the natural world where Everett's love of the Ozarks is apparent. We observe the seasons with spring peepers, sassafras trees and the charm of finches. The second section greets us with Advent and moves through the church year, as we experience the celebrations and stories of faith. Our interior life is contemplated in the final section. It opens with a lullaby, then poems of family, romantic love, heartbreak, grief and, finally, acceptance bringing us through our emotional seasons. This collection of poems celebrates the essence of our world as we move through The Course of Our Seasons.

"Within the struggle, joy, pain, and delight that attend our life, there is an invisible circle of grace that enfolds and encompasses us in every moment. Blessings help us to perceive this circle of grace, to find our place of belonging within it, and to receive the strength the circle holds for us." -from the Introduction Beginning in Advent and moving through the sacred seasons of the Christian year, Circle of Grace offers Jan's distinctive and poetic blessings that illuminate the treasures each season offers to us.