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This year will be the 6th year with our family advent calendar (it’s reusable #winning). My children are now 7 and 9 years old still enjoy picking activities and opening the envelopes.
Instead of a chocolate advent calendar how about doing something fun together every day leading up to Christmas?
In 2015, we spent a lovely weekend in November creating our family advent calendar together. We put it up on 1st December and it’s gone up every year since becoming our family tradition every Christmas.
The family advent calendar is made up of 25 envelopes that we have decorated and inside are activities we’ve chosen that we would like to do in December together. Every morning one of the children takes turns in opening the envelope for that day to find out what activity we will be doing.
"Put on Jingle Bells because it's time to dance!!"
All you need to make your advent calendar:
Now the fun begins… ;-)
Anyway you want for each day to Christmas. Number your envelopes 1 to 25 (you need one envelope for each day in December including Christmas).
I wrote the numbers then number stickers were spotted. They then came in handy to identify what day they were for the well decorated ones ;-) If your children are keen let them write the numbers themselves.
Anyone in a close range has to get involved. Including visitors that day. Friends or family happen to pop by – get them to do an envelope. Let it get messy and take the opportunity to let them use anything they want. The glitter glue got a workout. Check out our 1 December envelope, took a while to dry.
Come up with an activity to do each day. Let everyone choose something. Write them on the index cards.
We’d love to see what you come up with. Every year we go through all the activities and choose new ones if we think of any. I also put some surprise ones in :)
Roll the brown paper out and get sticking. Stick the envelopes in numeric order with Christmas at the top. Decide what activities you will do each day (put an activity index card in each). Remember you can switch it up as you go. Then hang up your masterpiece. We stuck ours up with pins and sticky tape on our living room door.
Below is our masterpiece “Hunter Family Advent Calendar 2015”
From 1 December let your children take turns opening the envelope each day and do the activity together.
You can move cards around as you go. Snow day = build a snowman no matter what activity it’s supposed to be (the Christmas card writing can wait!! ;-).
That’s ok! We just take special day envelopes for the days we are away. Last year we were in Budapest so we took envelopes (22-25) and the children still got to open an envelope every day. “Get on an airplane” “Explore a new city” “Go ice skating!”
Looking forward to putting our calendar up, choosing our activities, and opening each envelope from the 1st December. Maybe I am just or more excited than the children.
Disclaimer
To be honest I was worried my kids would be bored after decorating the first envelope. Maybe it was pure luck but they got right into it. Our whole table was covered with decorating materials and we all had fun making it together. We were all proud of our creations :-)
Every year we choose gifts for children in need (Christmas Tree Project)
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