Craft: Advent Calendar

25 Days of Christmas Cheer

Saturday November 30th, 2013 is the perfect day to create a holiday Advent Calendar. You will start the 1st day of December and count down the 25 days until Christmas. There are many ways to celebrate each day of December. You may have an activity to complete for each day of December or a litte gift each day or you can even do a candy advent calendar and have a little candy treat for each day.

Examples of Holiday Activities for December:

1. Start a family Advent Calendar (easy enough right?)
2. Go Christmas tree shopping
3. Decorate your Christmas tree and home while listening to holiday music
4. Enjoy hot coco and a Christmas Movie ("A Christmas Story", "Polar Express", "A Charlie Brown Christmas", "How the Grinch Stole Christmas"...)
5. Go look at Christmas lights in the neighborhood 
6. Be a secret Santa to someone
7. Take a family trip to the snow
8. Go Christmas shopping
9. Donate old coats or canned food to charity
10. Take a picture with Santa
11. Send out Christmas cards
12. Make paper snowflakes from coffee filters
13. Bake holiday cookies and decorate them
14. Host a Christmas party (gift wrapping party, ornament party, cookie party etc.)
15. Go to a local holiday parade or tree lighting
16. Snuggle up next to a fire
17. Create homemade ornaments
18. Go Ice Skating
19. Make gingerbread houses
20. Go to a holiday play (The Nutcracker, The Grinch...)
21. Make a sand snowman at the beach
22. Go to a holiday gift exchange party
23. Go Christmas Caroling ("Silent Night", "Away in a Manger", "O Come All Ye Faithful", "Jingle Bells")
24. Sleep under the Christmas Tree
25. Kiss under the mistletoe
26. Holiday game night
27. Have a holiday photo shoot
28. Attend midnight mass or holiday church service
29. Leave cookies & milk out for Santa
30. Write a letter to Santa

Craft: Advent Calendar

The Advent Calendar Jenn chose to make is a Christmas Tree of gifts with clothespins and construction paper. You will need:

• 25 Clothespins
• Paint brush
• Red Paint
• Printer and green paper
• Heavy duty construction poster board
• Green poster board paper
• Elmer's glue
• hot glue gun
• foam glitter sheets
• white or gold bow
• 25 gift tags, envelopes and/or pouches

The first thing you should do is paint all of your clothespins red. In a large area (outside on the ground, on a table or the floor inside) lay down newspaper and get all of your painting supplies ready. Paint each top of the clothespins let dry, flip each clothespin as you paint and paint the bottoms and insides.

Next, create a MS Word document of letters 1 - 25. Print out the numbers on green paper and glue to the dry clothespins. Set aside.

Take your large heavy duty poster board paper & lay it down. Decide how large you want your green poster board tree to be and cut a tree out. (see photo below for example). Create your tree and glue to the black or white heavy duty poster board. Let dry for about 30 min.

Next heat up your glue gun and glue each clothespin to your holiday poster board tree. You can add decorations as well. I added little gems and glitter to look like ornaments.

Next get your 25 little gifts/activities or candy to add. I chose to do a mixture. Add to the clothespins, hang up on the wall and you have your own custom Advent Calendar.

Until we blog again, Cheers to December XoXo Connie & Jenn