
The holiday season is here! It's time to start marking the sleeps till the big day.
Here are some fun ways to incorporate your kids into the countdown. Most of these suggestions are for Christmas, but many also work with other holidays and even things like birthdays — whenever your kids have a hard time waiting!

Paper chain

Put kids to work decorating the paper you use to make the chain, or let them pick out ribbons and pipe cleaners and old wrapping paper or recycled paper — anything that can be made into a loop. Older kids could help you count to 24 or do the cutting of strips.
Don't worry if your little one gets bored partway through the project, though — mine did!
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Cutting out the decorated links | Taping the links; you could use staples or glue. |
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Concentrating on the task — until he got bored and wandered off to play with decorations. How many Christmases will he have those deliciously chubby cheeks? |
Stitchery calendar

When I was growing up, we used a felt calendar my mom had put together when my older brother was still a baby: a large green felt tree with 24 felt ornaments with hook-and-loop backing that stuck to it one at a time. My brother and I used to tussle to see who got to put up evens and who got odds, because the person with number 24 got to place the golden star on top.
If you're in a stitching mood, you can find a kit or pattern or idea to spark your creativity and fashion a keepsake that will be passed down for generations, the way that felt tree is now being used by my niece.
I love the vibrancy of this Alex felt kit
Check out the gorgeous one Sarah at Parenting God's Children is making, based on this beauty at Homemade by Jill:

Now that I know there's a pattern online I can follow, I might just have to bust out my felt-making skills!
P.S. If you're not a sewer, you could also buy one ready-made
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Mikko at 1.5, unclear on the concept of eating the Advent candy |
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Mikko at 2.5, unclear on the concept of hanging up the Advent calendar |
Commercial calendars

Lighting candles

An accepted method of noting the passing days or weeks in multiple religions is lighting candles. Hanukkah, of course, celebrates with a menorah. In the Christian tradition, an Advent wreath with four candles around the perimeter and a Christ candle in the center marks the weeks of religious Advent.
I always loved seeing the first candle get smaller and smaller and the staggered effect of the pink and purple candles burning down in order as we lit each in turn. Lighting the Christ candle took place on Christmas Eve and indicated the birth of the baby in the manger. (Talk about unassisted natural birth!)
Since having children, I've gotten squeamish about lighting candles, for two reasons, both to do with safety. Fire safety is a big concern with an active and curious preschooler around, and air health is another one. I don't suppose lighting five candles a year is going to pollute our home's air supply beyond measure, but it's still something I'm conscious of.
Fortunately, there are plenty of fake but still pretty candle options
Family celebration
Our church this year handed out Advent booklets for us to bring home that have two suggested songs for the week as well as a daily selection of Bible readings. One song is a Christmas or Advent hymn, and one is a well-known children's song. The idea is to incorporate your kids into the worship, so when we slept through church on Sunday (ahem), we had our own little service at home. We handed out shakers and other percussion instruments (even Alrik got one to rattle and gnaw!), sang our songs, read a very small portion of the Scripture readings (antsiness was a factor), and ate some "Jesus bread" Sam and Mikko had baked for us. (That's what Mikko calls the bread they have for Communion at church.)If you don't have a handily prepared booklet, you can actually buy one
Other religious countdowns
You might wish to include other faith-based elements into your countdown.is so cool it makes me want to incorporate it into our celebrations! It features a toy menorah, dreidel, six coins, and potato latkes that are cooking. Add a board book
A Jesse Tree uses Christian symbols that correspond with Bible stories or verses. Here are the traditional ornaments to hang, which you can simply print out and then have your kids color. Cut them out, paste them onto cardstock, punch a hole, thread a ribbon, and hang one each day. You could prepare them all in advance, or one a day as you go. The tree itself can be a small real or artificial tree (the

If you want to count down to Yule or Solstice, here's an online Advent calendar with pictures of Pagan holy places, educational tidbits, and inspiring poetry.
If your family has no particular faith, you could create your own celebration. Maybe you'll simply mark down the days till the (scientific) winter solstice and enjoy the promise
Surprise-a-day
When Sam and I were still newlyweds, we had a tiny fake tree from Sam's high school days. One year, I decided to make an interactive Advent calendar, so I made 24 little baggies of surprises. Each day contained a card I'd printed out with a Christmas-themed Bible verse (because I am a dork) and a special prize for us to share. Mostly, it was just candy that we had languishing in a drawer, but it was still fun to divide it up for all the days.Activity-a-day
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Run DMT's amazing Advent calendar of surprises |
This year Dionna at Code Name: Mama made it easier on the rest of us. She came up with a list of possibilities you can adapt for your own use!
Craft-a-day
Darcel at The Mahogany Way is doing a daily craft, inspired by a challenge over at the Nest. You can follow along and copy their ideas or come up with your own, geared to your kids' abilities and interests.Christy at Adventures in Mommyhood has an idea to make 24 ornaments from homemade clay. If you poke a hole in the top and let them dry out, presumably you could hang them, too!
Container calendars
If you need a calendar that allows you to pop in little slips of notepaper with that day's activity, supplies for a craft, a sweet treat, or even a teensy gift, there are many options you can buy or make.Some of the wooden calendars are gorgeous but pricey

I also quite like the idea of combining magnets with little boxes, as in this tutorial on Buzzings of a Queen Bee:

It doesn't need to be boxes, either. This garland is unfortunately out of stock, but you could figure out how to craft your own:

I'm really curious to see the tutorial for this one from Emily at Embrita Blogging. It looks like a series of pockets, too:

Your pockets or garlands could be out of paper, envelopes, buckets, drawstring cloth bags, boxes with string, paper bags — anything that can hold something! And to hang them up, how about clothespins à la Sunday in bed?

If you need more crafty eye candy, feast on Pinterest.
If that's intimidating, you could go much simpler as well: You could make up twenty-four slips of paper with activities in advance and put the slips in a jar to have your kids pull one out at random each day. Or you could print them on little cards and tape them facing down to a big poster board calendar to remove one by one. Or punch holes in the tops, thread ribbon through, and hang them from the tree like I did!
You're also not limited to candy and pieces of paper. You could wrap 24 little presents and have a feast of gift opening all month long. Maybe one could be a CD of holiday music; one could be festive novelty socks; one could be supplies for that day's craft; and one could be the (shelf-stable) ingredients for a favorite recipe. They wouldn't even need to be new items, just lovingly wrapped and carefully doled out to enjoy afresh.
Another plus for putting together your own calendar — or spinning off one that you've found — is that you can add in enough little treats per day for each child (or child-at-heart), so there's no bickering over who gets the prize.
Basket of books
Someone last year mentioned that she puts out a basket of wrapped holiday-themed books, and she and her child open one to read each day. (Who were you? I'm way too forgetful!) At the time, I was thinking, I don't have 24 Christmas books! But maybe I could check some out of the library to supplement what I have at home. It's a cuddly idea for those dark winter days!Monthlong buildup
Instead of taking away something each day, you could add on. Maybe you could come up with 24 holiday songs you love or want to learn, and sing one each day. Or you could pick a saying or Scripture reading (according to your family's beliefs) and learn a small portion each day, until at the end of the countdown, you have the whole portion memorized.You could even decorate your Christmas tree this way, by picking out 24 ornaments (or per child or per person in your family, depending on the sizes of your tree and your ornament collection) to set aside and placing one decoration on the tree each day — perhaps finishing with the crowning angel or star.
Another fun idea would be to buy or make a Christmas puzzle with 24 pieces (or maybe 48, and give out two a day), and then slowly put it together. (Here's one
Using holiday-themed magnets
Monthlong kindness
Along the lines of the activity-a-day, you could make all your activities outwardly focused, in the spirit of giving. You could each look for one small act of kindness to do for someone else every day, and you could prepare some charitable family activities in advance to support that, such as collecting coats for a clothing drive, cleaning out toys to give to Toys for Tots, purchasing a present from an Angel Tree, or preparing gift baskets for a local shelter.
I know I want to put some thought into what sort of Advent calendars I might create for future Christmases, now that we have two little kidlets to count down with! I'm already blueprinting a felt calendar in my head, and I'd love to decide on some activity-centric things to do as well.
Does your family have an Advent calendar? What's your favorite kind of countdown technique with kids?
If you have other fun Advent-theme links to share, leave them in the comments!
This post has been extensively edited from a previous version.
Amazon, Melissa & Doug, & Truth in the Tinsel links are affiliate links.
See my full disclosure policy here.
Amazon, Melissa & Doug, & Truth in the Tinsel links are affiliate links.
See my full disclosure policy here.
3 comments:
What great ideas!
Instead of candy or gifts, we do a daily activity during Advent - some big, some small, some fun for us, some blessings for others, some indoors, some outdoors. Each activity is recorded on a sheet of paper, then folded into an envelope and hung, side-by-side with the rest, on a string on the wall. One envelope is opened each morning, and when the envelopes are gone, it will be Christmas. I blogged about it last year here: http://hippiehousewife.blogspot.com/2010/12/our-advent.html.
We did a simple paper chain this year. Since we celebrate Channukah, Solstice, and Christmas in our house, I made different colors to represent the different holidays, so my kids can see when each will fall, and how they overlap.
I love all of these ideas and I feel SO HONORED to be included in it!! I love Advent/Christmas countdown activities, they are so fun. I want to try them all, ok well probably NOT the Stitchery calendar since my sewing skills are pitiful at best.
All of my kids except my oldest lost interest about halfway through our paper chain this year too lol.
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