Advent Calendars, Continued

A Note From Karen

One of the holiday traditions both my son and I look forward to each year is the advent calendar. He loves having something to open every day in December and I love watching his anticipation each day.

I'll admit that for the last two years, we’ve been using calendars that are store-bought and have a piece of chocolate behind each door. This year, I wanted to do something different. Something more personal. I know he likes the little treat every day and I am happy to still give that to him but I wanted to make sure he doesn’t grow up thinking that opening an advent calendar just means getting chocolate.

So, I decided to make a tag with pockets for each day. In each pocket, I put a card with a little message. Every night, he will take out the appropriate card and do whatever’s on it.

Here’s what one tag looks like:

My tags are constructed very simply. Since there are 25 days, I decided to pick 5 different color schemes for the tags and pockets and I repeated each five times. Here are the basic steps I followed for each tag:

1. Take manila tag, adhere to background paper, cut.
2. Ink edges with dark brown chalk ink.
3. Cut pocket, ink its edges using the same ink.
4. Stitch around the tag, stitching the pocket in place in the process.
5. Embellish.

That’s it. Simple as pie.

Here’s how they look altogether:

materials | papers and embellishments (The Girls' Paperie)

If you look carefully, you can see that the color combinations repeat but because I embellished each slightly differently, they don’ t look exactly the same.

Here is a closer look at each tag:




For the insides, I made a 2x2 square which says “ celebrate the season” in tiny font. (You can download it here. I then printed them out and punched out the squares. I stapled ribbon to the back of each
square.

Finally, I wrote each day’ s item on the tag.

Some of the items are purely for him (like the one in the photo) and others are family-related like “give your brother a hug.” And yet others are more community-wide, like helping a friend at school.

Here’ s what the tags look like with the papers in them.

I’ll admit that this project was a bit time consuming, but mostly because I spent a lot of time picking the simple embellishments on each tag. I love the fact that I can keep the same system year after year and even use the same squares, or change them around as my kids grow up. I can even put two squares in one pocket so each of my kids can draw one.

Flexible, simple, pretty.