A couple of years ago we celebrated Christmas Eve at my sister Laura and bro-in-law J.D.’s house. Laura had made this great advent calendar and I have always wanted to make one myself. Here is a picture of the one she made. I think it is super cool.

I had to throw in this second picture just for fun. The advent calendar is in the background but I like the picture mainly because it is a cute picture of our oldest daughter Claire (on the left) and her cute cousin. How quickly they grow up! (check out the picture of Claire at the end of the post to see what I mean)

We decided Thanksgiving weekend to make a calendar for our own family to enjoy and advent calendars start on December 1st so we had till then to get it done. Deadlines are always good to help get a project done. So let’s get down to business. First you need 25 boxes. My sister purchased her boxes at Xpedx, a local paper/boxes/invitations store, so I headed on over and purchased all of the boxes for about $20. Some have patterns while others are plain. We also painted a few of them to add some different colors.

Next we needed some numbers. This proved to be a tougher task then I originally thought. I went to three different stores and just didn’t find what I was looking for. I found a few of the numbers and then decided that I would just have to create the others on my own.

We printed out a bunch of numbers with different fonts, colors, and patterns. I wish I could have found some more three-dimensional numbers but no such luck.

We had some good helpers on this project and Mr. Max did a fine job using his first grade cutting skills.

After assembling the boxes and attaching the numbers we were ready to go. We got our final layout put together but now we needed a location for this newly created calendar.

Months ago we painted this big square/rectangle magnet board in our boy’s bedroom using magnetic paint. It took about seven coats of paint before the magnets would really stick, in the end it was worth it.

You can paint over the magnet paint with another color if you want but we decided to just leave it black. Our boys love to hang up their favorite artwork, posters and pictures. The beauty of it is that you can switch it out easily without putting new holes in the wall or trying to change out frames.

We decided this would be a fun spot for our new advent calendar. We got ourselves some magnets to attach to the back of the boxes and this project was done!

Did you notice the crooked four? Sorry about that. Don’t worry though I fixed it, I was just too lazy to shoot another photo.

Here is a quick shot of our little helpers on this project. Notice the little lady in the middle, that is the same little lady that was in the picture that started this post.

Instead of putting little presents or prizes  in the boxes we decided, again following the  advice of my sister, to put in a little slip of paper with a different holiday activity/adventure for each day. I guess you could say this has become an advent-ure calendar!

Posted by Greg