I blew my grandiose advent calendar plans for this year, big time. I was incredibly inspired by all the ones you guys made last year (Rosa's was my all time favorite). So inspired, in fact, that I vowed it would be the last year we would use our Playmobil advent calendar. But, before I knew it December 1 was staring me in the face with n'ere an advent to be found in my house. So, I did what any sensible craft-obsessed mother with two sweet little angelic faces staring at me asking where the advent was would do...
I threw one together.
We seem to be teeming over with trees around here, so it seemed logical to use one of them to create an advent. The tree in the above picture is a goose feather tree that was purchased last year. I had no definite plans for it, so I wrapped 24 tiny little beggar's pouches, numbered them, and tied each one up with green yarn (I did all of this, on, say, the 5th of the month). This resides in our family room, right beside the large and heavily decorated kid's Christmas tree, which this poor guy is all but eclipsed by.
What to put in each of the bags proved to be the easiest part. I discovered this wonderful little, jam-packed to the gills store in town called Home Cake (maybe you locals go regularly, but I'd never been in). It carries all sorts of cake decorating supplies and you could spend hours looking through that place and never see it all. I found several little flocked deer and other tiny things for next to nothing. Other days include:
- tiny ornaments for each of the kids
- small chocolate
- Christmas pencils
- those little Japanese erasers in little animal shapes
- teeny tiny animal cookies
- paper toys from The Toymaker
- tops
- tiny decks of cards
The December 24 advent will be new pjs. Somewhere along the line, we unconsciously started this tradition of going to bed on Christmas Eve in new pjs. Its the most excited my kids get over clothing of any kind all year long.
I guess my little tree didn't turn out so bad. And now I have another year to daydream about one for next year. If you would like to daydream along with me, here are some images from this book that Sarah posted about, which kind of inspired my own advent tree.
