Christmas Book Advent Calendar

I’m so excited to start this new tradition with our little girl this year – a Christmas Book Advent Calendar or Christmas Book Countdown.

This idea is not original to me, in fact, I actually did something like this with my nieces and nephew a few years ago, but this will be the first year we’ll do get to do it our little girl.  She is 2 1/2 and I get asked multiple times a day, “Mommy, will you read this book to me?”, so this will be perfect!    I haven’t gotten the “how many more days until Christmas” question, but I’m sure once the real presents start appearing under the tree that question is coming!

So if you are unfamiliar with this idea, you gather 25 books, preferably Christmas themed but don’t have to be, wrap them all up, and then open one each day, and read it as you count down the days till Christmas.

Of course in Frugal Homemaker style, I scoured my local thrift stores to add to some Christmas books we already had until I had 25.  Some are duplicate titles but the stories are a bit different, and at age 2 she won’t care and we’ll probably be reading them over and over again anyways   I’ll have to continue to look for some more and trade some out in years to come.

Here’s the books I had…

I put the Night Before Christmas on the 24th, and actually on the 25th, Christmas Day, she will open a new book which is part of her Christmas presents this year.  We try to stick to the 4 gift rule for Christmas (something to read, something to wear, something you need, something you want).

The books are honestly only part of this fun tradition thought – part of it is getting to open a present each day, the surprise of seeing what book it is, and then reading it together!

As for the cute tags, I saw Lauren McBride post her book advent calendar she’s doing this year on Instagram last week and she created a free set of printable tags which I loved.  So you can go visit her blog to print the free printable tags, and she also has a whole list of books she ordered from Amazon if you need some ideas of what books to get.  My plan is to keep the twine and the tags so I can reuse them next year (I printed them on cardstock), and I will put all the books and the twine/tags in a Christmas bin in the attic until next Christmas.    It really didn’t take that long to wrap either – my Hallmark movie was barely half over and I was already done!   Since they are close to the same shape, I could cut one strip of wrapping and then cut that into 2-3 sections to do 2-3 books at a time.

We plan to keep them in this basket on the hearth to keep them together and make for easy floor cleanup.

Now this momma can’t wait until December 1st!  Making special memories and traditions is such a special part of Christmas!   I’d love to hear ways you do an advent calendar or countdown the days until Christmas or even hear your family traditions.  We are trying to make some new ones this year especially since she is really old enough to understand and do so much this year.