My Advent Calendar 2012

Yesterday I shared my friend Daniela's fantastic advent calendar garland. Now it's time for a look at our advent calendar for this year...

Do you remember the advent calendar that we used last year? You can see it here. This advent calendar was purchased from my favourite Swedish stationery store Kikki.K before we left Australia last year. I really wish that Kikki.K would open stores here in America. Anyway, I'm getting side tracked...

I love the simplicity of this advent calendar. The design is minimalistic and modern while still festive with its red and white colour theme. As with last year I have made vouchers for holiday activities to include in the advent calendar. Last year's vouchers were very simple (hand written on card) as my craft supplies, computer, printer etc were still in transit from Australia.

This year I decided to design something a little more stylish for the advent calendar. Keeping with the simplicity of the calendar I went for a simple, modern design: blackboard background, red banner, white text and fine white borders. To help the girls pull each voucher out of the advent calendar I added some red and white baker's twine as a pull string. Nothing fancy but I think it goes quite well with the calendar.

Christmas activity vouchers ready for the advent calendar

Advent Activities

This year our advent calendar is a little different.

Rather than the kids finding a chocolate or other sweet each day in the lead up to Christmas, I have prepared activity vouchers for them. Each voucher is good for a particular Christmas activity such as choosing a Christmas tree, visiting Santa, ice skating in Union Square...

As all of our belongings are yet to arrive from Australia (they're at the dock waiting for delivery) I haven't been able to be quite as creative as I'd like with the presentation of the vouchers. No photoshop and no craft materials have made it a little tricky. A cutting mat, rotary knife, hole punch etc would have all come in very handy. As these sorts of items are all on their way here I was hesitant to spend money on new supplies. This has resulted in the vouchers looking a little shabbier than I would have liked but as the saying goes, it's the thought that counts! I've got all sorts of ideas for Advent Activity Vouchers for next year so stay tuned...

For the base of our advent calendar this year I have gone with this Kikki K advent calendar.

I saw one of these in a Kikki K window display last year and just had to have it. Unfortunately they had sold out Australia wide and were not able to sell their display stock. When I saw this year's version of the calendar in store in early October I just had to snap it up straight away. And it was lucky I did as they were sold out Australia wide by the time I came to America!

The first two pockets of our advent calendar were filled with little cards that Ava had made so I started the vouchers on Day 3 with a visit to America's Children's Holiday Parade - or "The Christmas Pageant" as we called it :)