Instagram | Family Fun | Advent plans
It can be incredibly difficult to keep Jesus the focus of our Advent season. Feeling the pressure of creating a 'perfect' Christmas day with all its trimmings, we often overlook the importance of celebrating Advent! The Snap Advent Photo Challenge, created by my late friend, Laure Lynch, and me in 2014, seemed the perfect way to help us focus our attention on seasonal words that kept us grounded in Advent. In addition to being an innovative and entertaining way to evangelize.
As a social media specialist for Catholic Mom, I knew our @CatholicMomCommunity accounts on both Instagram and Facebook would be the perfect place to host the Snap Advent photo challenge, especially because Laure loved being a Catholic Mom more than anything in the world! The Catholic Mom Advent Photo Challenge will use the hashtag: #CMsnapAdvent. Searcing this hashtag will allow you to see how others participating have interpreted the daily prompts. This year, the challenge is going global, with some of the 28 Holy Cross Family Ministry centers from 18 countries across the globe will be joining in. Instructions on how to participate or follow along can be found below.
How To Participate in #CMSnapAdvent
All the daily photo prompts can be found on the #CMsnapAdvent graphic located both at the bottom of this article and @CatholicMomCommunity on Instagram and Facebook. Each day snap a photo according to that day’s theme, or honestly whenever you can get to it — Laure was infamous for being days behind and posting a few at a time or skipping them altogether — there is no wrong way to play along!
Now that Instagram allows the posting of photos from your desktop computer, it's even easier to participate in this photo challenge. Another option is creating a carousel roundup at the end of each week!
When sharing, be sure to use the hashtag #CMsnapAdvent as well as the day’s theme, such as #wreath on Day One. Also, be sure to tag @CatholicMomCommunity on whichever (or both) social platforms.
We look forward to seeing how you interpret each day’s prompt/theme. It is also fun to plug in the #CMsnapAdvent hashtag to the Instagram (or Facebook) search and spend a little time scrolling through the images and reflecting on how Jesus fills the season in such unique ways. When we launched Snap Advent we used the hashtag #SnapAdvent, I still love looking through old photos; so fascinating how different our celebrations can look years later.
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Maybe we’ll be trendsetters, drawing people to use their social media to reflect on the true meaning of Christmas this year. We may even help coin a new prayer phrase, something to the effect of “social feed divina”: the prayerful perusing of your social media!