I can't believe how fast this month has gone! Here we are 10 days before Christmas, 15 days away from 2013, and I feel like I'm still stuck back in May!
We are BIG fans of Christmas in our house, and this year is no exception! We have Baba and Bumpa joining us for Christmas this year, and we are so excited! Jellybean has been counting down the days on her advent calendar. Wait, advent calendars. Every year, we do a traditional Advent calendar that Baba actually made for me when I was in University. Jelly has taken it over, and it is now our traditional calendar that we use every year.
This year, we decided to add another fun calendar, that also combined a craft. We saw this idea on Pinterest from inviting printables, and we loved it!!
And of course, we had to do the chocolate calendar, just for good measure :)
One thing we decided to do this year as well was a book advent calendar. We've talked a few times about Over The Big Moon on here, because they are FANTASTIC! I am on their email list, and I love all of the creative and fun ideas that pop up in my inbox each day! Jellybean loves them, too, as it means more fun stuff for her!
The 25 days of books is awesome as an advent calendar for a few reasons. First, we use it each day for number recognition and number matching. She has the quilted calendar that she does each night, and she matches the number on the package to the number on the calendar. It's amazing how much she has learned this month from that alone!
To get started, grab a roll of paper, some tape, a felt and enough books for each day in December leading up to Christmas. Please note: the chocolates are optional, but always a nice addition :)
Then, just wrap them up! If you wanted to, you could wrap them in Christmas paper and use bows. We chose to use art paper from IKEA, for $4.99 per roll. We used less than a roll for the whole month, and Jelly gets the rest for crafts!
Once you've got everything wrapped, label the books with one number for each day. You may want to do this step as you wrap them, so you can keep track of them. We kept a few books for specific days, like the Night Before Christmas for Christmas Eve, the Polar Express for the night before that so was can watch the movie as well. Not all of the books are specifically for Christmas, so any about snowmen or snow and things like that were given at the beginning of the month, and anything Santa or Christmas related were given closer to Christmas. We also gave her a few that focused on the birth of Christ, to help her learn that Christmas isn't just about presents, that there is a religious aspect to it, too. I think she loved those books best of all, and she has continued to read them each day.
We keep our books in a pile next to our Christmas tree. Then, as she does her advent calendar each day, she gets to pick out the one for the day and we read it at bed time.
Definitely a tradition we will continue next year!
Definitely a tradition we will continue next year!
Some of the books we used are:
The Night Before Christmas
The Night Before Christmas
The Polar Express
Snowmen at Christmas by Caralyn Buehner
The Berenstein Bears and the Nutcracker
Santa's Magic Bag by Susan Karnavosky
It's Snowing by Gail Gibbons
And several more which, of course, I can't recall. But we will post a complete list after they are all open!
Happy Holidays!
