Advent Calendar

So I was at Home Goods a few weeks back, oogling at the Christmas decorations and trying not to purchase anything, when I came across a beautiful advent calendar Christmas tree thing (yes that's the technical term) but at $79.99 it was far to expensive for me. So, naturally I took a picture and went home to the hubbs and asked him to duplicate it. 

Here is the Home Goods version.....

And here is our version....

The hubbs used wood he had left over from other projects, I spent 18$ on the baskets, and 3$ on the chalkboard for the top of the tree. So the total cost for this AWESOME Advent Calendar is a whopping 22$. And we will have this in our home for years to come.

In each of those little baskets I put three pieces of candy (one for each kid), a passage of scripture for us to read together before bed, and a clue to the fun activity that we have planned for the day. The activities vary from baking cookies, to singing carols at a nursing home, to delivering goodies to our friends and family, to ice skating and much more. The culminating activity is for us to bake a cake Christmas Eve so that we an enjoy birthday cake for breakfast on Jesus' birthday. I love having a month long celebration of our Saviors birth!

This is the reading plan we use for each day leading up to Christmas.

The Advent Calendar has always been one of my favorite Christmas traditions. Growing up we always had those cardboard calendars and I loved getting to eat the chocolate each day. When I had kids I knew I wanted to have a countdown to Christ's birth.  I have been tweaking it for the past few years to include all the elements that we would like to have and I think it's finally where we want it.

Merry Christmas Everyone!!!