A special Advent calendar

Follow my blog with Bloglovin 

Little Miss H is now 18 months old and this year we want to fully immerse her in the Christmas spirit. A special Advent calendar of Yuletide activities seemed the perfect way to introduce her to some fabulous new festive traditions. Creating magical memories along the way.

Our daughter is also obsessed with books and we decided to give her a book a day for Advent. These include Christmas books that we gave her last year and some bargains that I purchased in our local TK Maxx store. I love that shop. I was able to find some real bargains including 7 Octonaut books for £2.00. (Little Miss H and I are obsessed with the adventures of Captain Barnacles and the crew of the Octopod.)

Organising these Advent calendars was simple. We already had a number of Christmas events in the diary. I wrote these into a list with craft and baking projects, trips out with mummy and daddy and a few cosy activities to do at home. Our Christmas activities Advent calendar for 2014 looks like this:

1. Help mummy prepare the fruit for the Christmas cake.
2. Make Christmas cards to send to family.
3. Write a letter to Father Christmas.
4. Help mummy to bake the Christmas cake.
5. Buy the Christmas tree and put the decorations up.
6. Attend the Christmas Toddler Sense party.
7. Go with mummy, daddy, nanny and grampy to the Rochester Dickens Christmas Festival.
8. Make Christmas salt dough decorations.
9. Read Christmas stories.
10. Make Christmas wrapping paper.
11. Go to see Santa at Bluewater.
12. Sing and dance to our Christmas play list with mummy.
13. Christmas celebrations with grandma and grandpa.
14. Drink hot chocolate and watch a Christmas movie.
15. Do some Christmas painting.
16. Colour in Frozen colouring pages.
17. Go to see the Christmas lights.
18. Help mummy wrap Christmas presents.
19. Bake Christmas cookies.
20. Fakemas with mummy and daddy.
21. Go for a long walk and a Sunday lunch with mummy and daddy.
22. Make Christmas plates for Father Christmas and Rudolph.
23. Make reindeer dust.
24. Open Christmas Eve box; sprinkle the reindeer dust; put out snacks for Father Christmas and Rudolph and lay out our stockings.

I didn't want to just write these activities out on scraps of paper. So I got my craft on. I made tags to put on the wrapped books.

I used old Christmas cards to make the activity cards. (I am hoping that I will be able to reuse many of these each year).

Finally, I wrapped the books and placed the activity card inside (making sure that I matched the numbered tag to the correct day's activity). 

Et voila...!

Little Miss H has loved opening her parcels each morning and we've enjoyed reading her new books. And we've already had lots of fun eating the fruit for the Christmas cake, covering the flat in glitter and drawing on everything but her letter for Father Christmas. 

On Monday, I will share the photos of the first week of Advent's activities. But if you are nosey then you can see the pictures daily by following me on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

Are you doing anything special for Advent? If so, then I would love to hear all about it in the comments.

Hugs

Mrs H 

xxxx

PS. Mr H and I have a standard chocolate Advent calendar. On our first Christmas living together, we left it really late to buy a calendar. Our local Sainsburys only had Disney Princess calendars left in stock. We bought one and ate our Advent chocolates with pride. This has now become a tradition and every year we make sure we buy the cutest and girliest Advent calendar we can find. This year's offering is dedicated to Sophia the First and Doc McStuffins!