Day 1, Advent Calendar

Happy December 1st!  I've decided to post something Christmas related for the first twelve days of December.  Glad you could join me for day one.

When I was little, we always had some sort of advent calendar to help us count the days till Christmas.  My mom made a candy count down for us one year.  She used a long strip of green felt, attached 24 strips of red ribbon, and tied a peppermint to each ribbon.  That was a fun way to count down to Christmas.  We also had a 3-D cardboard manger display that had a little window to open each day.  I think there was a Christmas story or part of a verse to read behind the window.  For whatever reason, I always got a kick out of the daily activity of opening a new window or removing a candy.  I wanted to pass on the tradition to our son.

To keep things simple, I decided to use an old classroom calendar to help K see the progression of days till Christmas.  The teacher in me can't pass up the opportunity to teach him about the days of the week, the concept of months, and counting!  Each morning we're adding the date to the calendar and then counting how many days left until Christmas.  Nothing fancy, but I love that he's learning and there's no candy involved!  Also, this will help him understand the passage of time when we are away in China.

This year's advent calendar.  Nothing fancy, but K thinks it's fun.

I did see a cool and crafty idea for an advent calendar using a mini muffin pan.  Perhaps next year when K is older and I'm not preparing for an international trip we'll try it.  If you are feeling creative, or want a new way to help your kids count the days till Christmas, I've found a great blog tutorial to help get you started with the mini muffin tin idea.  You can get step by step directions here: http://sumossweetstuff.blogspot.com/2009/11/tutorial-tuesday-advent-calendar.html

I don't know the owner of this blog, and just stumbled upon it by chance, but I love her ideas.  Hopefully she won't mind that I'm giving you a sneak peek of her project picture here.  The fun thing about the muffin tins is that you can put whatever you want behind the magnetic circles: a treat, a message, a poem, a promise of a fun Christmas activity to do that day, or part of an on-going story.  If you try it, leave me a message or a link to your blog so we can see how it turned out.

Sneak peek of the mini muffin tin advent calendar.
Photo borrowed from Sumo's Sweet Stuff blogspot.com

See you tomorrow for day 2 of my 12 blogs about Christmas.