I love Christmas.

It’s my favorite holiday. Maybe it’s because it’s also my best friend’s birthday (aka my mom’s – who was also born in Bethlehem!) but I just love the holiday. It makes me happy… well at least when I avoid shopping during this time. Nothing will get rid of my Christmas spirit faster than going to Wal-Mart, I tell ya.

Anyway, this year, I decided to do some stuff to get the Christmas spirit going in this house. I made my first advent calendar. It was almost free. I won’t go into a huge, in-depth tutorial, because there’s so many ways to make these, and this is my meager contribution. All I did was wrap a piece of scrap wood with some felt I had on hand, and hot-glued handmade cards to it for the kids to pull out every day. I will say if I do this next year, I’ll use colored construction paper, and I’ll print the darn things off instead of hand-lettering them! (I will say – so I remember later – that the font I used was Mardi Gras!) The card template I used (with a few edits) was the “4 and 3/4″ square envelope template” from here. I could get one card and one envelope from a single sheet of 8 1/2 x 11″ card stock paper that I have lying around.

The kids are already excited for tomorrow, so they can finally start pulling out cards and see what they say. They’ve never done an advent calendar before (heck, neither have I!) so they’re wondering what will happen. I’d explained that usually, it’s “open a door, eat a piece pf candy” sort of thing, but I wanted this to be more interesting. So instead, I made a list of one Christmas-y thing per day we can do. if you’re interested, my list looks like this:

1. Write a letter to Santa.
2. Pick 10 toys (each) to give to Goodwill.
3. Decorate the house for Christmas.
4. Make Christmas cards.
5. Make and hang up paper snowflakes.
6. Play a board game.
7. Make snow globes.
8. Shop for Fred and Fezzik. This is our goldfish and our new puppy!
9. Read a Christmas story. This one will also introduce Christopher Popinkins to the house – so that’ll be ongoing fun!
10. Go ice skating.
11. Make presents for teachers.
12. Put up the Christmas tree.
13. Roast marshmallows in the fireplace.
14. Visit Light Fanstasia.
15. Play “Christmas Pictionary.”
16. Watch “Polar Express.”
17. Camp out under the tree.
18. Make gingerbread house and cookies! I think I’ll provide a tutorial for the house, too – we make it every year!
19. Go visit Santa.
20. Drive around and look at Christmas lights.
21. Wrap Christmas presents.
22. Do a Christmas “word search” game. I think this will be more of a scavenger hunt, but we’ll see!
23. Listen to Christmas songs.
24. Prepare and set out cookies for Santa and yummies for his reindeer!

It took me a while to make up this list – hubs wasn’t much of a help at all. He couldn’t think of anything! I also had to carefully arrange what was chosen on what nights – stuff like “Camping out under the tree” and “make a gingerbread house” were relegated to weekend projects. My husband is also out of town for a week in December, so I had to carefully arrange things that I could do on my own with the kids while he was gone. And the 22nd and 23rd, we’ll be on our way to my mom’s in West Virginia, so we had to do something we could bring along in the car.

Anyway, I thought I’d share. Maybe it’ll give inspiration to others!