Activity Advent Calendar – Background and Day 1

This year, Michael and I agreed not to give each other Christmas presents. With our move over the summer and all the nice things we bought when we moved in (like our king-sized bed), we spent quite a bit on ourselves so spending more at Christmas just didn’t make sense. That said, I wanted to make our first Christmas in our own house in MN a fun one. So, courtesy of Pinterest, I got the idea to do a “Christmas Activity Calendar.” Each day, you assign a Christmas-y activity for you to do. I spend several weeks coming up with ideas and assigning (and reassigning activities, which I am still doing) to each day. I planned to create my own Advent calendar like this:

But after spending 10 hours hand-sewing sequins for our Christmas stockings (more on that later), I was crafted out and decided to just buy one. I found this cute one at Joann Fabrics.

I cut out little pieces of paper with a fun saying of what our activity is for each day and put them behind the doors. There were several things I wanted to include but we did them before December 1:

Decorate the outside of our house

“Deck the Hall” – decorate the inside of our house

Buy a Christmas tree

Decorate the Christmas tree

Buy or create an ornament for our tree

Luckily, I had lots of ideas so it was easy to fill each door. I knew going into it that we might not be able to do everything on the day it was assigned, and that’s ok. I’ve also already had to move a few things around, and that’s ok too. It’s just supposed to be fun so I’m not going to get hung up on doing everything on its assigned day.

I put the calendar out on a bookshelf a few days before Dec 1 and let Michael try to guess what was behind the doors for each day (he guessed candy). It was fun to see his face after he opened the box the first day and figured out the theme of the calendar.

Day 1

We still have a little bit of work to do on our stockings. Let’s finish them tonight!

I started working our Christmas stockings for M and I about three weeks ago. Let me be the first to admit, I am not a crafty person. But since my mom made our family’s and my sister Jami made her family’s, I felt like I should make ours too. I didn’t really have much for a vision so I went to Joann’s (literally six times) and Michael’s to get some ideas. I went with felt, simply b/c I don’t have a sewing machine and I didn’t want to hand-stitch fabric. Felt allowed me to use glue, which worked well. Plus, I consider these temporary, as we will have “Mom” and “Dad” stockings someday. So after hours of stitching, cutting, gluing, a few freakouts, and some tears, we finally finished them last week. I planned to have them be a surprise for Michael, but he came home from a hunting trip early, when I was working on them, so he saw them. And that actually worked out nicely because he was a huge help on several parts of them.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how they turned out. Michael's name is long so that created a challenge but I solved it eventually. They certainly look homemade and we don’t have a place to hang them (yet), but I am glad we have stockings with some character for our first Christmas in our house.