December 4, 2011

Advent Calendar

Welcome December! This is my FAVORITE time of the year. I love everything about Christmas and now that I'm a mom I get to watch the little prince experience the wonders and joys of the holiday as well.

Part of the Christmas season for me is about tradition - decorating the Christmas tree, listening to Christmas music, dinner with my family - creating those memories that you take with you throughout your life.

The Advent calendar was not a part of my childhood Christmas tradition but I decided this would be a great way to reinforce the story of the birth of Christ in a way that was fun for my four year old. Of course I got the bright idea to create our own calendar instead of buying one. Why do I do this to myself? I don't know about you, but whenever I say "this will be easy" I have automatically set myself up for a much longer process than originally anticipated and this calendar was no exception...lol!

Using plain white posterboard, some Christmas fabric that I've had for a while, some thin ribbon and scrapbook paper I set to work on making a calendar that we can use for years to come.


The completed calendar

Each pocket has a card with a picture on it that corresponds to the story

I took a small Christmas photo album (10 pages) that I found in the dollar bin at Target last year and covered it in one of the remaining pieces of fabric; added the story to the pages and now we have a coordinating Christmas story book. Though you can't see it clearly here, the story is divided into 'days' to correspond to the numbered pockets.

A close-up of the pockets and the three different fabric designs used.

Even though this took longer than expected (we were three days behind), I'm happy that I now have something that I can use with my son for many more Christmases to come.

Off I go to work on a few other projects...let's hope that at least one or two more Christmas crafts will make its way into blog-world.


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Dixie n Dottie

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is a beauty. It's probably a couple of years old but who cares. I'm going try to make it then, hopefully show you.
Whilst reading yours with all the tags and numbers, I was thinking perhaps if we still use board with Christmas material then you could use decorated envelopes with numbers on or
You could put 24 hooks on the board to hold little decorated buckets.

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