{"id":83,"date":"2023-11-30T20:40:59","date_gmt":"2023-11-30T20:40:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ahouseofplay.com\/?p=83"},"modified":"2023-12-01T22:05:48","modified_gmt":"2023-12-01T22:05:48","slug":"how-were-doing-advent-this-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ahouseofplay.com\/index.php\/2023\/11\/30\/how-were-doing-advent-this-year\/","title":{"rendered":"How We’re Doing Advent This Year"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Our Santa Pixy Advent calendar is from Maileg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
The Build a Bracelet Jewelry Advent Calendar is from Great Pretenders (purchased from the small shop Sewing Seeds Play) and the Thomas the Train Minis Calendar is from Amazon<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “How We’re Doing Advent This Year”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5,6,8],"class_list":["post-83","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-advent","tag-kidsadvent","tag-mailegadvent"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ahouseofplay.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ahouseofplay.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ahouseofplay.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ahouseofplay.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ahouseofplay.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/ahouseofplay.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":158,"href":"https:\/\/ahouseofplay.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions\/158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ahouseofplay.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ahouseofplay.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ahouseofplay.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}