My Homemade-Storebought Advent Calendar

The title prettymuch says it all.  I bought a bunch of things from various places, and put them together to create my very own Advent Calendar.  And I am (mostly) very pleased with how it turned out.

Growing up, we'd had a simple little paper Advent calendar that my mom would tape to a door.  We kids enjoyed opening the doors every day to count down the numbers...or opening multiple doors on one day because we'd forgotten for a couple days...you know how that goes. ;)  So at Munch's first Christmas, the idea was already in my head to make or find some sort of calendar for my little family at some point soon.  It started to bloom into reality last year when I went shopping the day after Christmas with a friend of mine, and we hit the jackpot at a Barnes and Noble:  2 Playmobil Nativity Scenes, going for $20 each...half the original price.  Naturally, we both snatched those up in a flash (small confession, I'd ALWAYS wanted Playmobil toys as a kid, so I guess I'm living that through the Munch now), and I've had it in my basement waiting for the next season ever since.  

Then this year, we had some authors come to our church promoting their book, "The Advent Book", which is designed to be read slowly, adding one page each day throughout the month of December, building the Biblical Christmas story a day at a time.  The first day only one page is read, the second day, the first and second pages, and so on.  Very repetitive, but also very beautiful, and it incorporates the use of doors for its pages, too.  A number of families at our church already had it, so I'd gotten sneak peaks of it before, and was thus VERY interested when those authors showed up and said they were selling it right then and there.  The best part was that they were selling books that had slight problems--didn't lay completely flat, scratches on the covers, things like that--at a discounted price.  Yay for discounts!!  I can't even tell mine isn't 'perfect'.

We read this book to the Munch every night in place of her usual bedtime story, and she LOVED it.  "We wead A-vent book now, pease, pease?"  was a common refrain all month long.

So early on, before even my decorations were up, I got the bright idea:  Why not combine this book with my playmobil nativity scene?  Like I didn't have anything else to do or set up, right? Well, I took out the nativity scene, and divided it as best I could into 25 parts...and there really just weren't enough pieces to go around.  Plus I didn't have things like the wise men, or Simeon at the temple, or the multiple angels the story kinda requires.  But I made do as best I could, and slowly throughout the month, we brought out more of the "main-jah seen", as Munch called it, for her to play with.  And she loved that too!

But by the time Christmas was past, I knew just the nativity scene wasn't going to cut it if I wanted it to match the book.  There were too many other details that it left out that the book expounded on.  So I went a-hunting, hoping for the same luck I'd had last year.  It didn't happen...at least, not quite the way I'd expected.  I didn't get any discounts this time around.  But I DID get:  a Roman official who was apparently being discontinued, and suited rather nicely for King Herod; my 3 wise men and camel; the only a large angel and St. Nicholas set in the store, and St. Nicholas will, for the moment, do very nicely for Simeon; and a small angel and Santa--and the Santa joins up nicely with another playmobil set that's not Bible-related.  It's still a tad simple to what my perfectionist self has in mind--a couple more shepherds/animals/angels would be nice, and a better Simeon--but it will most definitely do.

The last part of this process was by far the most time-consuming...I needed to make boxes to keep all those little pieces in.  So I got out my little cutting board and knives and cardstock, and went to work.  And ended up taking about 3-4 weeks, because it was tedious work.  I found some number stickers at a craft store, and they fit...mostly.  I may enlarge a couple boxes at some point, but for now, I'm done with this project...

 cutting the flat box shape

 gluing the sides

 numbering up through 24--since we read the book in the evening, 24 made more sense than 25.

And the best part is, even with all those extra pieces and all those little boxes, it still ALL fits in the one big Nativity Scene box!  Win!

So I now have my homemade-storebought Advent Calendar packed away and ready for next year.  I still want to get some sort of display board to attach all the boxes to during the month of December...I haven't quite decided what that will look like yet--magnetic, velcro, ties of some sort, I don't know.  But I'm excited to see how this will play out next year!

Oh yeah, and despite the fact that this has lots of tiny pieces, and the Munch was playing with this thing ALL month long, not a single piece has gone permanently missing.  Yet.  ;)