Our Advent Activity Calendar

Last year the girls were given a beautiful advent calendar handmade by Auntie Titi, the kind where a little pocket is stitched on for each day and you can fill it with whatever you choose. Last year we filled it up with Elizabeth Shaw Mint Crisp Dark Chocolates (this is what I had in our advent calendar when I was young so to me they are the only and best advent calendar chocolates).

This year however the girls were lucky enough to receive not one, not two, but three chocolate calendars as well as a lovely picture one, so we decided to fill up the fabric one with little envelopes suggesting activities we could do together during Advent instead. I had good intentions to do this before the 1st of December but time ran away from me so actually only got round to doing it last night. So we started our Advent activity calendar today, on the 4th December.

I sat and brainstormed 24 activities (three of which we had already done to count for the first three days that we missed!) and here are the activities I came up with:

Make Christmas tree biscuits

Create a stable for our Nativity scene

Make a pomander

Read the Nativity story together

Write a letter to Santa

Make Christmas hot chocolate

Make some Christmas playdough

Decorate the Christmas cake

Make mince pies

Sing carols together

Make a Christmas table centrepiece

Make a paper wreath

Watch a Christmas movie together

Buy and read a new Christmas book

Make snowflakes

Decorate the jars of Christmas Chutney to give as gifts
Buy/make gifts for mummy, daddy etc...

Make a Christmas tree decoration (I included this activity three times)

Go and see a pantomime

Make a wreath for the door (already done)

Decorate the tree (already done)

Make some snow dough (already done, and oh what a disaster!)

I wrote the activities on little pieces of card that I then folded up to form little envelopes; stickers wouldn't hold them closed so I tied them up with little ribbons. I also numbered them on the back so I would know what they were, and the night before I can check the next day's activity and switch them about if I need to.

Today's activity was to make a Christmas Tree decoration, and we made cute little walnut babies for our tree that I will hopefully post about soon, as Poppet loved making them!

Poppet: 2ys 10mos

Little: 1yr 2mos