Advent Calendar 2013

Every year the countdown to Christmas from December first in our house is an exciting time. We usually have a hand sewn advent calendar that I fill with all different types of treats and activities to make this time special. You can read about our past Advent Calendars here.  This year I was faced with the challenge of two children who still really wanted to count down til Christmas and an overseas holiday for the last half of countdown.  So this is what I came up with - brown paper bags decorated with paper doilies cut in various ways and some printed numbers from Pinterest (link here) on the front.  I chose paper bags because they are big enough to hold something of a decent size but can be thrown away too.  My list this year involves more sweet treats than we would usually have but I did what I could and what was easiest for our circumstances.

So this is what our bags ended up looking like.

And below is the list of what we have in each bag each day:

1. A Christmas play date with friends
2. A coupon for 1 app each from the app store
3. Chocolate
4. Popcorn
5. Chocolate
6. Chocolate
7. Chocolate
8. A coupon for a movie rental
9. A coupon for an afternoon ice cream from the local shop
10. A book about Asia
11. Going to see 'The Nutcracker' ballet in the city
12. A magazine each for our trip away
13. Sweets and chewy for the flight
14. Hong Kong dollars for spending
15. Deoderant each
16. Chocolate
17. Grinch Pills
18. A $1 scratchie each
19. Hand Santa-tizer
20. Sweets
21. A coupon for a mocktail on our cruise
22. Sweets
23. Snowman poop
24. Vietnam money for spending

I used Pinterest a lot for this advent calendar this year.  So below are the links for the coupons I printed and other things I made that were from there.

Coupons (link HERE) I printed them out and just used the ones that were relevant to us.

Our book on Asia is this kids one from Lonely Planet.  I got ours at the Book Depository (link here)

The Grinch Pills were from Pinterest (link here) and they look like this (just using Tic Tacs)

The Snowman Poop was very similar using Tic Tacs again and was from Pinterest (link here).

And finally the hand Santa-tizer was from Pinterest too (link here) and they look like this using just a small hand sanitizer bottle.

Enjoy your Countdown to Christmas!