Christmas Traditions – Family Activity Advent Calendar!

Like many people, Christmas is my very favorite holiday!  I love the decorations, I love the gift giving, I love the time with family, I love getting gifts (yes, I admit that!), and I love the traditions that surround it.  When my husband and I got married, we both wanted to incorporate our own families’ traditions into our holiday celebrations, but we also wanted to come up with our own traditions – something that was just ours.  We’ve got a lovely balance of traditions that bring us a lot of joy during the holiday season.  Last year, our first Christmas as parents, we decided to add a new one.  And it’s one of our new favorites.  We (well, mostly I!) created an advent calendar filled with Christmas activities that we could do as a family.  Some were bigger activities, some were simple and quick.  But it really filled our holidays with family fun.  We’re excited for this year’s advent calendar.  Here were some of our ideas…

First, find or make an advent calendar.  It can be simple.  You can even put each day’s activity in an envelope, if that suits you better.

Second, come up with your ideas for activities and put them on slips of paper and place them in the corresponding day…  These are some of our ideas.  For the record, I have well over 25 ideas typed up in my little document.  That way, we can pick and choose each year what we want to include.  Some of them we’ll do every year, others we’ll mix up a bit year to year.

Then, enjoy the fun activities you’ve planned with your family!  It takes time to come up with the activities, figure out what dates work for which activities, make the slips & cut them out, do all the leg work for the activities – but it’s all time and effort well worth it, in my opinion.  We had an absolute blast last Christmas doing all these fun activities together, and we can’t wait for this year’s activities!

Clockwise (starting in upper left corner): Hanging up the our son’s first ornament that we picked out together, making salt dough ornaments with our son’s handprint, watching A Charlie Brown Christmas together as a family, coloring a Christmas picture.

Clockwise (starting in upper left corner – pictures not in order):  Our boy eating his first candy cane (we had candy cane shakes that my husband made), our Christmas Eve party complete with pinata, Christmas morning, our son’s “Merry Christmas” bath (bath crayons & green colored water).

I’m sure you can alter this to fit your belief system – maybe a Hanukkah countdown, or something of that sort!  Have a wonderful holiday season!

Disclosure: No products or compensation received for this post.