We have a wall-sized advent calendar that I sewed for the kids a few years ago – as a way to build excitement for the holidays.
Here’s what I tucked inside this year:
Items I bought:
– advent calendars with chocolates inside (on day 1)
– a sheet of Christmas stickers
-notebooks and pens from the dollar store
– plastic ball ornaments for their bedroom Christmas trees (from the dollar store)
-a domino game (from the dollar store)
-a bag of Christmas M&M’s (divided up into mini Ziploc bags for each child – for smaller portions)
-a block of air dry clay to make ornaments
-a package of Voortman Christmas cookies
-a snowman door decorating kit from the dollar store
-a ticket to a drive through light show
-homemade marshmallows from a local coffee shop
-gingerbread house and then for the three days afterwards, I tucked in different bags of candy for them to use for decorating (we did this in the four days right before Christmas as we did the houses on Christmas Eve)
-foam snowmen cutouts from the dollar store (for the kids to decorate as a craft)
-watercolour palettes (I wrapped them and tucked them in on the 25th to open. We let on that Santa had left them)
-smelly markers
Materials I re-used from home:
-Santa toques (which we already had from last year)
-a Christmas colouring book (that we had tucked away from last year)
-wood disks to make ornaments
-I sewed the kids little Rudolph face masks
-paintbrushes (which we already had at home – tucked it to show we were going to paint our ornaments that day)
-gingerbread men cookie cutters (to show we were going to bake cookies that day)
-hot chocolate
Gifted items:
-our neighbours gifted the kids each a molded chocolate on a stick (so I tucked them in a pocket one day)
-friends sent the kids Christmas tattoos in a Christmas card
– Christmas jammies (my Mom had bought them for the kids. We tucked them in so the kids had them for pajama day at school)
This year I found myself re-using items more just because I didn’t want to go out shopping with covid. It worked out for the best! It made me get creative with what we already had in the house and I would definitely do it more next year.
