Getting Ready for Advent!

We have always observed the Advent Season in our house. This year I wanted to fix an Advent Calendar for the grandkids. I looked around for some good Advent calendars, but couldn't find anything that I liked (most just had little pieces of hard candy), so I just decided to make my own. For this project I needed construction paper, cookie cutters, markers, glue stick, ribbon and of course GIFTS! I have been picking up little gifts for the last couple of weeks...little cars, trains, books, puppets, etc.

First I traced the outline of the Christmas cookie cutters on the construction paper and cut them out and decorated them. Then I wanted to find a small coloring book with the story of the birth of Christ, but I couldn't find a small one, so I searched the internet and found just what I needed. I printed the story pages off, and made each paper into a little booklet/gift tag. So, I ended up with an assortment of ornament looking tags for the first half of Advent and the Story tags for the last half. I then just tied these to the wrapped gifts that I had bought and now they are ready to be opened on their appropriate day. This was a little time consuming, but I enjoyed doing it.

This picture didn't turn out very good. But you get the idea. When I printed off this Christmas story, the pictures did not print dark enough so I had to go over all the details in the pictures with a black pen.

I sure hope that they have a good time opening their Advent gifts.