Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Christmas Comes Early

Shhh! Don't tell my husband* but I couldn't last any longer and already stuck up my first Christmas decoration!

* I think he might notice when he comes home from work though....

Last month - like when they still had Halloween stuff out - I stumbled upon this cutesy peel and and stick advent calendar at Target! It was less than $6 and I obviously could not pass that up! It has been sitting underneath my giant wooden cutting board in the kitchen for well over a week so that I could get it flattened out from being crumbled in the box and I just HAD to hang it up!


Each day Madison gets to peel off one of the Christmas ornaments to reveal a surprise ornament underneath! I am probably more excited about all of the advent calendars than anyone else in this house but that's okay!

I also made 25 small cards with a fun craft or activity on them as a Christmas Countdown activity too. I had so many different ideas rolling around for this craft but I finally decided to just keep and simple and not even add days to them so that I could pick and choose based on our schedule of the day. All of the red cards have some sort of family activity and the green cards are crafts. Here is the complete list of activities I have planned!

Family Time Activities
* Let's decorate the Christmas tree

* A car ride to look at Christmas lights

* Make a gingerbread house

* Make your own gourmet hot cocoa

* Time to make cookies for Santa

* Shopping for Toys for Tots

* Christmas Eve ~ What's waiting under the tree?

* Sunday Surprise ~ I have three of these cards and every Sunday Madison will get to open a new seasonal book

* Holiday Movie ~ There is also three of these cards because every Friday we watch a family movie and have dinner in the living room!


Craft Time

* Christmas puppets
* Dough ornaments

* Paper Christmas trees

* Foam nativity set

* Snowflake candle jars

* Cookie cutter printing

* Cinnamon playdough

* Snowflake ornaments

* Reindeer food

* Mitten sun catchers

* Winter sensory bin



Do you have some fun activities planned for your little one? Please share!

8 comments:

Natalie PlanetSmarty said...

I love it - I am planning something like this as well, only in our calendar there will be sweets in addition to special cards.

Georgine said...

B likes glitter - and dinosaurs. So that her new craft. I do a glue outline of a dino and she glitters it. Totally a graft that makes no mess. What is reindeer food? Oooohhh and I want to make dough ornaments. Where did you learn how to do that? Wow, dough dino ornaments we could glitter. That would be perfect!

Sheena said...

What a great list. We are planning on doing some of those same crafts and family activities. I was just going to do them whenever, but this makes me want to plan everything out for certain days.

Michelle said...

I love this advent tree! You have so many fun activities planned thank you for sharing :0)

Holly said...

I love the tree, I was actually just talking to DH about drawing me one and I would draw the ornaments and have them laminated Monday so we can start on Tuesday! I'm so excited!

Holly said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Izzie, Mac & Me said...

This is a great idea! I hope I can pull together something as special to do with Izzie...I still have tomorrow! Congratulations, you're a Pay It Forward winner! Please send me your shipping address and I'll send Maddie some goodies!

Heidi Boos said...

A great group of activities...I like that you split them into family time and craft time. My favorite idea is the "Sunday Surprise" - mind if I borrow that idea? ;) I also decided not to have the days pre-planned for activities. I'm just going to decide the night before on what the next day's activity will be (chosen from a list of ideas I've compiled).