Who else was shocked that yesterday was already December 1st! It seems like Halloween was only yesterday. As I was lying in bed last night it dawned on me that I had planned on doing our first Advent Calendar this year and I had nothing done for it! Therefore, this morning I took the little one’s into my craft room and got to work on a quick calendar that would give my little girl a fun activity for each day this month leading up to Christmas.
To begin, I picked out some pieces of holiday scrapbook paper and let her pick the one that we wanted to use as our calendar backdrop. I used my Cricut to cut out 24 squares that would hold our daily activities and I also cut out numbers 1-24 to go on each square. I pasted three sides of the squares onto the paper, leaving the top open.

After this was complete, I went back to my Cricut and cut out tags that would fit in each square and that had a tab on the top so grabbing the activity each day would be easy for our little lady. After that was done, I went onto the computer and printed out the list of activities that we are going to complete throughout the month.

I thought of the holiday traditions that we do each year anyway and added a few more that I thought would be fun. For the upcoming years, I will probably stick with the ones that we have done year after year and the ones that we find that we really enjoyed, but I’ll mix in some new ones here and there to keep it interesting. Here is the list for this year.

• Christmas Light Tour
• Make Gingerbread Houses
• Visit Santa
• Watch Polar Express
• Make Neighbor Gifts
• Read Christmas Story
• Make Christmas Cards
• Write Santa
• Sweet Treat
• Color Christmas Pages
• Make Paper Snowflakes
• Bake Cookies
• Watch Christmas Movie
• Sledding
• Picnic by the Tree
• Decorate Christmas Tree
• Window Shopping
• Take a Wintry Walk
• Make Apple Cider and Popcorn
• Snowball Fight
• Christmas Song Dance Party
• Deliver Christmas Cards
• Hot Chocolate Night
• Christmas Craft

I attached each activity to the tab and went about dispersing them throughout the month. I tried to make each activity small enough to do in the evening when my husband gets home and for the few activities that would take longer, I placed them in the weekends. I folded the tabs of each tag over the edge of the square to further ensure that my two year old’s little fingers could easily get them out without destroying the calendar each day.
And there we have our first ever Advent Calendar!