We hope everyone had a wonderful long weekend full of lots of delicious Thanksgiving food. We sure did and now we get to have leftovers for the rest of the week! Pumpkin pie brownies for breakfast anyone?

Now that Thanksgiving is over, we can look forward to Christmas and begin shamelessly decorating our apartment full of snowflakes and moose. So far we have hung up some Christmas lights and put out fun decorative pillows, but as Christmas approaches we are sure to add more!

Because tomorrow is the first day of December, we have a simple advent calendar that uses minimal supplies. All we bought for this project was a small 6×6 pack of scrapbook paper at T.J. Maxx for $3. This pack was from American Crafts and had some really cute pages that we just couldn’t resist. T.J. Maxx’s always has the best craft supplies for cheap. Along with the craft paper we just used some plain white paper to cut out the numbers.

What we did for this advent calendar was ripped out 25 pages from the scrapbook paper book and then laid them out on our floor in a Christmas tree shape. We decided we liked our tree to be taller rather than wide and so ended up with two rows of 5, two rows of 4, and then it went 3, 2, 1.

Once the tree was in a style we liked, we then traced numbers1-25 onto white paper and cut them out. Okay, we have to admit we first tried to free-hand the letters, which came out horrible, so we had to trace the numbers.

Now is the fun part – instead of creating a advent calendar that gives out a piece of candy or present each day, we decided to make ours interactive. We wrote down 25 different activities to do, so each day we flip up the day and reveal something we have to do that day.

Here are some examples: make hot chocolate, go ice skating, watch Elf. We thought this would be a fun activity to get us in the Christmas spirit and maybe even do some things we wouldn’t normally do, like go ice skating. Since we work during the day we broke up our weekends differently and had slightly more involved activities on those days. We stuck to the more simple tasks for the weekdays, such as making hot chocolate.

We wrote the activity on the back of piece of the paper, but you could put it hidden on the front as well. We mostly wanted to be able to use the paper again so we didn’t write on it.

We hope you enjoyed our advent calendar and let us know what activities you would put on your calendar! Happy December everyone!