I grew up with a strong holiday tradition around Christmas, and consequently, it’s the one I’m most enthusiastic about in my own house. I do all the decorating with significant input from my kids, and things generally have to go in the same place each year unless I negotiate with my youngest. He was NOT happy the year we invested in an artificial tree so it could stay up while we traveled without fear of burning the house down, but he’s come to accept its presence in our house only if it supplements the real tree we’ll eventually put up in the family room. So, as of now, our living room is decorated with the fake tree, covered in all the peacock-themed ornaments we’ve collected since living in a community that hosts an occasional wild peacock or three (complete with the coyotes to eat them – hence the word “occasional”), plus my accidental collection of nutcrackers (accidentally collected because people saw the ones I’d inherited, decided I collected them, and then gifted them to me each year), and a simple wooden advent calendar in the shape of a house that I bought a million years ago from Target. (They don’t have it there anymore, but I found a bunch on Amazon if you’re interested).
I’m pretty sure the advent calendar house was designed to hold little candies or chocolates like the cardboard ones from Germany we used to get from the big Cost Plus in San Francisco when I was young. But the year I bought that advent calendar on a whim, when Ed was still working in London until just before Christmas, and I was the kind of mom who regulated sweets, I filled the little boxes with notes instead of candies. Each note contained an activity (sometimes I made them up on the spur of the moment, and sometimes it was a thing that had been planned in advance), and the kids traded off with odd and even days. They opened them first thing in the morning, and then had all day at school to anticipate the fun thing to come. The notes would then be tucked back into the cubby, or sometimes hidden inside a ceramic Santa box, which allowed for inspiration for the next year.
I just pulled some of the activities out of their cubbies, and am surprised at how nostalgic it made me for those little kid Christmases. The notes included things like:
1. Bake Spritz cookies
2. Read Ender’s Game out loud by the fire
3. Hot Chocolate and a Holiday movie
4. Dinner with Grammy
5. Make Christmas cards
6. Make Playdoh
7. Decorate the Christmas tree!
8. Put up the outside lights
9. Snuggle by the fire
10. Watch Lord of the Rings
11. Make gingerbread houses
12. Sing Christmas carols with friends
I still have the senior in high school at home, and the other one is coming back next week, so I’ve just tucked another note into the advent calendar.
I have a bunch of lemons and my youngest loves to bake, so we have an activity to do after school, and whether or not he cares about opening the advent calendar any more, I’ve rediscovered my own delight in planning the simple things that we can do together.
I love the activities theme of your calendar and now you have the memories that are sparked by each little piece of paper.