Celebrate December with an Advent Calendar

by Nora Noll (Dec 3, 2012)

When I was a little girl, every year we celebrated the days up to Christmas with an Advent calendar. Some years they would be store-bought cardboard with chocolate treats and other years my mother would fill a wreath with 25 peppermints. Whatever kind of treats they were, I was always excited when it was my turn. I decided to recreate this tradition for my daughter, Charlotte.

Not really having a plan in mind on how I wanted the calendar to look, I put a lot of thought into the design process. My first step was to figure out what I wanted to use as my base. I decided to go with a frame that housed an old 11" x 14" picture. I spray painted the frame white because I would be able to recycle it when Christmas was over.

My next step was to go to the craft store to see what inspired me for colors. The first thing I found was the jingle bells. I fell in love with the hues of the bells and decided that I would use pink, green and blue as my color scheme.

My third step was to figure out what I would use to hold the treat. I found these 2 ½" x 4" Kraft bags at the craft store and decided they would be perfect for a little treat and small enough to string up on the frame. However, any tiny packaging could be used. Seed packets, small envelopes or even tiny take boxes would be cute.

During some of my free moments, I sketched out what I might like to do to decorate each bag. I also decided to go a step further and make the calendar more than just a countdown to Christmas Day. I brainstormed little activities that my daughter could do for other people as random acts of kindness for each day.

I decided early on that I wanted to incorporate washi tape in some way and use BasicGrey's Aspen Frost paper to make some of the accents. Since I didn't want to spend a whole lot of money, I chose to use my Big Shot and Silhouette die cutters, inks and stamps, as well as my stash of Stickles, to make the decorations for the bag fronts. I then went to work decorating all twenty-five bags, leaving the numbers off for the time being.

After all the treat bags were complete, I tacked jute to the back of the frame, and attached the bags to the jute using tiny clothespins. I did not measure the rope and used tacks to hold it up so I could adjust it as I was hanging the bags. Then I took out my stash of alphabet stickers and adhered the numbers to the bags. I chose to do this step near the end so that I had the freedom to arrange the bags how I wanted them.

My last step was to fill the bags. I took each row down and stuffed each bag with a tiny bit of gift bag filler, a treat and the strip with the random act of kindness instruction. It was a lot of work but this is one of my favorite projects I have ever tackled.

I hope this article encourages you to make an Advent calendar of your own. It would even be fun to enlist your children to help make the calendar. My daughter helped stuff the bags with the treats she picked out especially for this project and it would be interesting to have your children come up with their own random acts of kindness.

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