My adorable advent calendar

Ok, so it's not fancy, but I think our advent calendar is adorable. We put it on our fireplace so we see it everyday.

Here's what we did:

1. Cut 24 3"x6" pieces of X-mas themed papers

2. Fold them in half

3. Put the dates on the front - I found some stick on numbers and put them on sort of randomly. When I ran out of the stick on ones, I just used a marker to print the rest :)

4. Print out you list of activities on address labels. I used the Avery 8160 template - they fit perfectly in the 3" square, but use what you like. And, of course, you can totally just write in there, but printing was faster and my handwriting is horrid.

5. Randomly stick your activities inside the cards. We had several planned out activities that we had to do on certain days, weekends, or what not, but try to keep it random - it's silly fun.

6. Cut ribbons to go around the card to keep them shut. A little over a foot each.

7. Put double sided tape on the back of each card, over the ribbon, so it stays in place and stick on your fireplace, or wherever!

Oh, and it sure is getting fun - and it's only the 2nd of the month! We had an easy one yesterday - "get a new Christmas CD". We got the Nutcracker...so looking forward to that. Today's was pretty hilarious. It was "open a gift". Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but I haven't gotten much shopping done quite yet. I guess that's what's so fun about this calendar - you just don't know what's coming, so it makes things pretty entertaining. So, today while I was grabbing some wrapping paper, I looked around for something for the hubby. I can hardly describe how hard this man is to shop for. Doesn't like anything (well, maybe a few things!), doesn't want anything, doesn't need anything...I have had a few triumphs over the years, but also a few failures. I'll let you know what he thinks about his wine thermometer some other time :(. Yep, I said wine thermometer. It was last minute!