The season of advent begins in two weeks! I started working on our advent calendar early this year and I would like to share what I made.
My inspiration for our calendar this time is to make a little Christmas village mobile using some cardboard and a piece of dried tree branch, very similar to the window charm I made with my kids some months ago (Read Window Charm DIY post here). Again, I wanted to use and recycle items I have lying around the house for this project so I really didn’t have to spend anything extra to make it.
Here are the materials I used: Cardboard, dried tree branch approximately 2.5 feet long, empty toilet paper tubes, acrylic paint, colored markers, yarn, ribbon, washi tape, masking tape, glue and scraps of wrapping paper.
But before putting together the physical calendar, first I plotted out the activities our family will observe for each day of advent. Similar to what I did last year, to make it easier to come up with 24 different activities, I assigned a theme for each day of the week (Example: Fridays – Work on a Christmas craft project, Saturdays – Receive a sweet treat, Sundays – Do a charitable deed). Once I had that figured out, I started working on the mobile. Here’s how:
1. To make the ornaments, I cut out the cardboard into different shapes. Because the inspiration was to make a village, I cut out trees, houses, birds and stars.
2. I painted each ornament using bright Christmas colors. Afterwards, I used my colored markers and added detail to them. I especially liked how the birds turned out!
3. Then I cut up small pieces of paper wherein I wrote the assigned activity for each day of advent.
4. On some days, the kids are supposed to receive a sweet treat, so instead of shapes, I used empty toilet paper tubes to make pillow boxes to hold the candy. I just made them look a little bit more festive by covering them with strips of wrapping paper. Later on, I attached yarn pompoms to the pillow boxes for additional charm!
5. Once all the ornaments and pillow boxes have been painted and decorated, I laid them out on a flat surface in the order I’d like them to be hung. And instead of lining them up into one straight line, I place them in different levels.
6. Then I taped strips of yarn or ribbon onto each ornament and, one by one, attached them onto the wooden branch.
7. Finally, once all off them have been attached to the branch, I glued each piece of paper containing the activities on the back of their respective ornament. I also put a small mark on each ornament saying what day it is (1 to 24).
I hung our advent caledar mobile up against an empty wall where it’s easily visible. I just love how colorful it is. It sure cheered up our home!
We started this family tradition last year with the hopes of making preparation towards Christmas meaningful and fun, specially for our children. I was really happy with how last year’s advent season turned out for our family, so I’m very excited to be doing it again this year.
