Thursday 5 December 2013

Advent Calendar.

Advent: "a season of expectant waiting and preparation for the celebration of the birth of Jesus at Christmas." Advent is here! I kept this year's calendar very simple, and yet it just might be my favorite ever. I was preparing for a Christmas book/day advent calendar but a few weeks before December 1st...and still needing at least 15 more books...and wanting to seek out something a little simpler on our very full, very overflowing plates this season-- I spotted something similar on pinterest* and a couple clicks later was ordering the angel wings on amazon. Oh these dangerous smartphones and dangerous nursing-baby-to-sleep chunks of time. Also I've always loved the idea of 24 days of Christmas activities instead of yet another trinket/small toy/stuff. I haven't done the trinket calendar with Mila yet and have to admit it all seems a little overkill--24 days of stuff and little presents only to culminate in a huge day of presents and more stuff? I mentioned this before, I'm really trying to stay deliberate in our choices and keep the focus more on joy, in celebration of Jesus and giving rather than presents galore and Santa. Don't get me wrong, we'll definitely be visiting the big guy--we've actually seen him at a local Breakfast with Santa event already and surely he's coming to the Vero mall, right Santa? And you're cool with crying babies because that's most likely how it's gonna down, right Santa? But anyways. Trying to get back to more of an anticipation in our advent, thus the activities. Plus they're things we'd be doing anyways...like going to see Christmas lights, a living Nativity, today Mila and I made snowglobes, tomorrow we'll try our hand in cutting out snowflakes, that sort of thing. Basically a Christmas bucket list. How I love my lists :) 




I think the calendar's pretty self-explanatory, but basically I wrote the activities on slips of watercolor paper dipped in different watercolors just to give it a pretty effect, then on the back of each a small adhesive number for that day, each hole-punched and attached with twine to the wings. Easy peasy. I pretty much busted it out the day before and only Dani was the wiser, since she woke up while I was tying the string up. Mila also has a window pop-up calendar from my mom with scripture verses each day (she loves it, and all the windows were already popped open in one excited, unsupervised moment). And she has yet another calendar, this time holding leftover bits of Halloween candy. And I justified that one by rationalizing she'll be driven to learn numbers 1-24 by sight this way. Ha! Or at the very least it keeps me from eating that candy. Yeah, that's more like it.

*Steve came home from work one day recently and asked me, "Have you ever heard of pinterest?" Oh boy. I had a good laugh over that one.

p.s. Other advent calendars: Last year's (look at tiny tiny Dani towards the end of that post!!).   2011. 2010. 2009.


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