Kick-start Christmas: how to make an easy Advent Calendar!

You will probably be amazed to learn that, despite my love of all things chocolate, I am a hardened fan of traditional Advent Calendars. Right from the childhood days, probably even before the chocolate Advent Calendar had been invented (did I mention I am now officially middle-aged?) I loved opening the window not for the gift but for the picture. Each seasonal symbol somehow made me feel a step closer to Christmas. And now that I have children of my own, I have the chance to foster a love of the season in them too. And I want to focus on the season rather than the gift.

Up until now LBG has been too small to really understand that much about Christmas, other than the man in the red suit from whom she has fled in tears every year, but when I heard her singing carols to her dolls, I knew it was time to up my game. Searching for a ‘tradition’ that I could introduce, I found Activity Advent Calendars on numerous American blogs, and they seemed to fit the bill exactly. Given how much my girls adore crafts, the idea of doing something every day in the countdown to 25th December, is metaphorical music to their ears.

And so, I ‘borrowed’ 24 brown envelopes in a variety of sizes from DH’s office, a set of Christmas stamps that I picked up only the other day in Poundland, and a Christmas Card hanger that I recently got from a Charity shop and created our very first Advent Activity Calendar.

It was a lovely craft in itself: the Girls enjoyed stamping so much that they carried on whilst I spent a while writing numbers on the envelopes.

I wrote down the activity ideas I had collected from my online research onto the back of obsolete business cards (in nice big letters, to help LBG with her reading) and slotted them into the envelopes.

Then we pegged the envelopes to the string (in typical fashion, it came with 20 pegs, but I supplemented them with a few red pegs left over from my Christmas Wreath craft.)

Now I am impatient for December to begin!

Our Advent Activity Calendar 2012 is live if you are looking for new ideas.