Advent Calendar

Things are starting to look Christmasy already here in Guadalajara!

The malls have all the decorations up...
the large manger scenes are going up...
poinsettas are being planted in the front and back yards (that was a hard one to get used to at first! Planting your poinsettas with your green grass for Christmas. But it's really pretty)...
Christmas decorations out in the stores...
live Christmas trees for sale all over the place...

We still have our lights up from last year so we're good to go with that :-) and we planted our poinsettas, so now we wait till Dec.1, the day our tree goes up.

This year, Dallas and I decided to do something we havn't done before. Kids tend to anticipate Christmas and the excitement of it and what they're going to do and get and give at Christmas time, and so with that,, we were thinking about how to make the whole month a time of anticipation and celebration as a family. We want to do fun things with the boys and also help them focus on and remember why we even have celebrations at Christmastime.

So through looking on Pinterest and other sites, I came up with the idea of making our own Advent calendar.

It's very simple as you can see! I didn't get all elaborate. All I did was cut 24 squares of scrapbook paper and glue them to cardstock. I then stapled another square over top of those squares and wrote the numbers on them.

Each day of December, the boys will tear off the number and see what they will do that day. I think they'll be pretty excited about it.

We need to think of some more yet, but some we included are
- Set up the Christmas tree and decorate it (on the 1st).
- Watch a Christmas movie and drink hot chocolate (the boys think it is ubber special to have a "hot" drink).
- Have food in the van so when we drive that day they can give it away to someone.
- Buy a present for their teacher.
- Do random acts of anonymous kindness around our neighbourhood (we need to flesh this one out a little...).
- Read certain passages on certain days to do with Jesus' birth.
- Do something nice for your brothers.

There are others but those are some ideas. We think it'll be fun :-)