Oh advent calendars. I love them! I can’t get enough of them. I just love the idea of doing a little something to countdown the days until Christmas. It’s fun to have a little something special to do each day.

I’m sure it’s related to how much we loved them as kids. We had 2. One was a wall hanging of a house. A little bear attached with velcro and moved from room to room each day looking for Christmas. The second was made by my Aunt Linda in the 80s (right, Mom?) Mom took these pictures on our living room rug and the last is hanging in my classroom a couple of years ago. I even took it to college a couple of times. My roommates always thought the elves looked demonic but I think it’s cute! I’d love to make one for myself. It used to hang in our kitchen and I remember pinning on the ornaments. We took turns doing the calendars, each of us getting a day to do it. I’m the youngest so I usually got to go first.

Now here’s a sampling of some of the many other advent calendars I have bookmarked and saved for future ideas. I’m hoping to make one over Christmas break too. I’m finding that I like ones that require adding something or moving something a little more than ones that would hold a treat because how do you do that with multiple kids? But there’s a ton of fun ideas out there.

I made this one last year. I threw it together at the last minute for a boutique and the picture is very poor quality. I used these sweet glittery chipboard shapes (maybe Scrapworks?) which I found on sale. I think I replaced the tree pieces with more ornaments later, when I had more time. I didn’t love the tree I used for the vinyl but it was the best I could find. I’ll probably redo it someday when I have my decorations with me again.

Heidi and I bought this one at the MoMA in October.

Found these book themed calendars from Stephanie’s Children’s Lit Book Club blog. I don’t have these ones yet but they look adorable. Love anything based on kids books.

Isn’t this one adorable? There’s a little board book to read each day!

Some cute ones from Etsy (click on them to go to the shops)…

I’d like to make my own with little doors one day, but this one is really well done!

ETA: Check out this beautiful homemade advent calendar by inchmark. Beautiful!

A lot of my favs are listed on two links I want to share so I’ll just go ahead and share those so you can see them all together. The first one is Heidi’s post last week about advent calendars. We’re SO sisters! Here’s her post. The second is The Crafty Crow. There are even some links to printable ones there!

Here’s a post on Oh Happy Day! With ideas for advent calendar activities.

Christmas Song of the Day: Wintersong by Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson. I haven’t yet found a way to host a song on my blog so we’ll go with a video this time.

Christmas Quote of the Day: “As we seek Christ, as we find Him, as we follow Him, we shall have the Christmas spirit, not for one fleeting day each year, but as our constant companion always. We shall learn to forget ourselves. We shall turn our thoughts to others. There is no shortage of opportunities to forget self and think of others. Such opportunities, however limitless they may be, are also perishable. There are hearts to gladden. There are kind words to say. There are gifts to be given. There are deeds to be done. There are souls to be saved.”
- Thomas S. Monson

See you tomorrow!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Christmas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.