Every holiday season my mom used to buy my brother and I a chocolate advent calendar. Every December day leading up to Christmas I opened a little cardboard door to reveal a Christmas symbol-shaped chocolate. I loved my calendars, and I got one every year until I moved out of the house. Now my mom buys them for my daughters, and while I like the tradition of the gift, I find I don’t want my young girls eating chocolate everyday. So this year I set out to replace the chocolate advent calendar with something new.
First I went on Etsy, where I was immediately overwhelmed by the diversity of advent calendars crafty people make. I found a couple I love, but unfortunately, as usual, I left it too late to receive any mail from the States by December 1st. Therefore, I have abandoned the idea of an Etsy advent calendar until next year.
Plan B: Make our own.
There are a lot of ideas out there. More than I ever could have imagined. And lots you can easily do with preschoolers. Taking time and date constraints into consideration, as well as esthetics, I chose to make two easy ones. There’s even enough time for you to do these!
The Advent Giving Jar
While I love the idea of each child receiving a little gift for each day of December leading up to Christmas, I also have mixed feelings about this. First, I neither want to stock up on eensy-weensy plastic toys nor give my children candy everyday. Plus, I always like an opportunity to instill the value of giving. So I got my family together and we came up with 24 little things we can do everyday to make a difference in someone’s life. Some ideas we came up with include “make cookies for a neighbour,” “donate a non-perishable item to the foodbank,” and “call someone we haven’t spoken to in a long time.” We also included special family activities (gifts for ourselves) to reinforce the holiday tradition of togetherness, like family swim night, a winter’s night walk and spa night. The girls helped decorate the jar by gluing pieces of red and white tissue paper and sparkles on it. As we do our good deeds we can hang each one on our Christmas tree, and when the jar is empty on Christmas Eve we can place a candle inside and use it as a lantern to help Santa find his way to our house.
The Advent Paper Chain
This one was more fun for the girls who got to cut the paper strips out of red and green construction paper, tape them together and put on some stickers (although not many – my oldest likes the simple look). My budding mathematician five year old also practiced printing her numbers on each link, making her feel very proud. Everyday they will take turns cutting a link, working their way towards Christmas Eve. So no one will lose an eye fighting over the scissors each girl chose a colour which they will be responsible for cutting.
There are fewer things more exciting than counting down to Christmas and fewer things nicer than spending quality time with family making crafts and coming up with ways to make other people happy. I hope if you were feeling run out of time for advent crafts that you’ll reconsider and try one of these.
Do you have any advent family traditions? What are they?
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Wow, these are such awesome ideas! I especially like the one about giving back a little each day. You’re so motivated. I’m so flipping lazy compared to this. I can barely get my ass out of bed and get the kid to pre-school, let alone be crafty every day. I envy you.
TheFeministBreeder´s last blog ..Full-time Worker, Full-time Student, Full-time Breastfeeder too
Nice crafty ideas. I might try the chain to give my almost 4 year old a good visual of counting down to Christmas. We have several Advent activities this year.
Tonight we lit our Advent wreath and will hopefully remember to do so every evening until Christmas.
We also have a reusable advent box. There are little numbered boxes framing an empty manger scene. Each day, you open a door and add a magnetic figure to the scene. I think the kids will love it!
We also made a Jesse Tree set with the ladies at church. There are 28 ornaments, so you need 28 people to participate. Each person makes 28 copies of 1 ornament, then we all exchange. Each day, you add an ornament to the tree and read some verses. It tells Jesus’ story from the creation of the Earth, until His birth.
Also, a friend shared a craft where you color a little paper angel and place it on a piece of cardboard. Each day your child does a good deed and gets to add a cotton ball to the cardboard so that the angel is standing on a cloud. So cute!
Not sure if we have enough to do everyday… ;-P Really though, I think this will be great for building anticipation for Christmas, as well as keeping in mind “the Reason for the Season.”
Happy Advent!
@FeministBreeder – If I was REALLY motivated I would have planned this months ago and had something spectacular to share today or I would have purchased the super awesome Etsy advent calendar I found. As it is I found these ideas the day before yesterday and crafted this morning. I find that planning crafts with the kids also ensures they get some quality mommy time on a day I’m otherwise usually trying to catch up with blog reading and writing.
@Jassica – What beautiful ideas you have! I especially love the Jesse Tree idea. While I’m not Christian myself I love the idea of everyone making the same ornament and trading with friends. Like a cookie exchange except more meaningful! The good deed angel idea is also a gem. Thank you for sharing!
I love your ideas, and I’m going to take your idea of the Advent giving jar. Since my son is going to be just a year old this Christmas, we haven’t thought much yet about developing meaningful, non-material family traditions for the holiday. I’m looking forward to involving him in this one.
Christina´s last blog ..Newborns, nursing, and hospital(ity)
Thank you for this great reminder! I had good intentions of making a fancy fabric calendar this year, but then I remembered – I have three kids! When in the world did I hope to accomplish that?
But when I was a kid, we always did the paper chain, and I had forgotten how much fun it is. Thank you for the reminder of a sweet part of my childhood. That’s what we’ll be doing today.
Jennifer´s last blog ..Bones
@Christina – Yes I suppose there isn’t a big rush to start too many traditions with a baby. It’s hard not to want to though. Once you have a family I find you want to start doing everything all at once and then you have to wonder who it’s for. I like the Advent jar because as much as it’s great for teaching the kids something and giving them a jar to decorate, the adults are really the main participants and it feels good to be a good model for your children.
@Jennifer – I actually had never heard of the advent paper chain before I found the idea on-line. That’s so neat to hear that you grew up with it!