I have a lot of fun with advent in December, which is probably why it’s a bit over the top. My husband smiles and shakes his head, but the kids love it and I do too. I don’t dare share my craziness with other mom’s I know, so I’m posting it here.
I like our advent to be a mixture of gifts and activities. I started this last year and although it’s more work to organize it before December 1st, I found that having the month planned out in advance helped me to relax and enjoy the Christmas festivities more. When will we make a gingerbread house? Are we going to look at Christmas Lights? When will we see Santa? I don’t need to worry about organizing, booking and making sure I don’t miss any of our Christmas traditions because it’s all planned. Of course, my kids also love a little gift, so this year I’ve included a few activity-related gifts with our advent and also got them pre-packaged advents with small gifts in them.
I’m also planning to soft launch some pixy antics in our home this year. It will be our version of Elf on the Shelf – the pixy may get up to some mischief, but there will be no reporting back to Santa on behaviour and no rules about touching the pixy. I thought the “no touching” Elf on the Shelf rule would be nearly impossible to enforce with my kids. Maileg also released the adorable Long Legged Pixy this year, so i thought it would be a good chance to try out some pixy fun. We will see how it goes. I don’t want to commit to anything that becomes too stressful or burdensome so I’m giving it a test run this year. The pixy will just show up one the first day of advent and move around each day. Can I keep up with the pixy? Stay tuned…
Oops, I almost forgot. I have one more advent related activity for the kids. A book advent. We have been collecting Christmas books for a few years and we finally have enough to try the book advent. There are only 2 to 3 new ones I collected throughout the year. The rest we already had. I wrapped them all individually in brown paper and scrap packing paper I found around the house and put them all in a crate at the top of our stairs. There are no numbers on the books. I thought the kids could pick out one each night as they head upstairs for bath. My kids tend to get fixated on one book and read it over and over. I know this is developmental and completely normal, but sometimes mom and dad want to read a different book. I thought the book advent would be a great way to encourage the kids to read all our Christmas books this year. It’s also a great set-it and forget-it activity for me.
So that’s it, our advent fun for this year: an activity advent, two store bought advents, pixy antics and a book advent. We are all in for a festive December.