Is your house overflowing with random pieces of your child’s artwork? Besides throwing it all in the recycle bin, why not create an up-cycle advent calendar?
Growing up, advent calendars were not a strong tradition in our family. It wasn’t until some family members gave us chocolate advent calendars that I thought about researching this tradition.
What Is An Advent Calendar?
I learned an advent calendar is a unique calendar used to count down the days until Christmas. It is also used to celebrate the advent season or waiting for the birth of Christ. The advent season begins either the fourth Sunday before Christmas or December first.
Historically, advent calendars were small wooden houses with twenty-five rectangular windows that opened and filled with small gifts, chocolates, or bible verses. Today, advent calendars range in themes and decor where the most popular version is the box of chocolates with games inside. Others create their own creative advent calendars, filling small boxes with gifts, games, or special activities.
We started this family tradition a few years ago and my children get so excited when I hang up the circles. Truthfully, I love seeing their excitement while giving our family an opportunity to connect during this crazy busy season.
While my children would be thrilled to receive a gift every day, I decided to focus our advent calendar on creating family experiences and memories. Some of the activities I selected include, playing board games together, donating items to the less fortunate, making ornaments, making teacher gifts, reading stories, and watching special movies together. I’m not a total Scrooge, I opted to give them a little gift once a week. These include kinetic sand, play dough, coloring books, and inexpensive art supplies. Click here for a list of ideas.
If you have scraps of kids’ artwork laying around, an up-cycle advent calendar is a super simple craft!
Materials
- scrap children’s artwork
- circle punch (cut 3.5″ diameter circle)
- washi tape
- number stencils
Up-Cycle Advent Calendar
Use the 3.5″ circle punch to punch out 25 circles out of your child’s artwork.
Next, use your number stencil to number each circle.
On the back write down the family activity.
Tape the circles on a wall or a large canvas in random numerical order.
Don’t feel limited to use a circle shape. I chose a circle because I have a circle puncher and it was less time consuming to create. Rectangles, squares, and triangles could work as well. This is a wonderful project that can help you and your family connect this holiday season.
There’s no limit to what you could create with this advent calendar!