Craft | Advent Calendar Craft

I generally buy my granddaughter an Advent Calendar, and it’s most usually a crappy $3 one from the grocery store. They have tiny little cheap chocolates in them, not that she minds. In fact she seems to really like the whole overall countdown to Christmas with cheap chocolates thing. Even so, I thought I’d make her an Advent Calendar this year. I thought about it a lot and this version that I came up with is a really fun idea…

My family has always celebrated Christmas, and that means having a Christmas tree that is fairly devoid of gifts until around Christmas Eve. I originally thought to make a lot of little gifts but the prospect of wrapping 24 tiny gifts didn’t appeal to me, go figure! So I decided that one decent sized gift that could be enjoyed 24 times and sit under the tree until Christmas would be nicer.

List of Stuff I used…

• Large Cereal Box
• 24 small paper cups (think Dixy)
• a sheet of cardboard around the same size as the cereal box
• a sheet of tissue paper (the gift type)
• scotch tape
• wrapping paper
• PVC glue (like white craft glue/Elmers)
• scissors
• box cutter
• straight ruler
• ribbon
• gift tag (optional)
• marker pen
• felt tip pens
• 24 wrapped chocolates and 10 little fancy toy rings

Here is how I made it…

My cereal box measured about 11 1/4 X 7 3/4 inches but a little bigger box would have worked better. (NOTE: not all the stuff I used is in the picture below)

First I measured the box in quarters then made a grid of 6 into each quarter. I found the metric side of the ruler more helpful and accurate for this.

Then I used the box cutter to make an X in each square, then I pushed them in to create a space to push the cups into. Yes, my cereal was 98% fat-free but that wasn’t important to this project!

I didn’t make them big enough and had to go back with scissors and cut them larger when I started putting the cups in.

If the box had been bigger I might have been able to just shove the cups in but I ended up having to cut a slit all the way from the top to the base of each cup.

Some of the grid broke when I put the cups in but once I measured out and taped on some strips of cardboard it was fine. I dropped a candy into each one, then I randomly dropped a fancy toy ring into some of them.

I added a thin line of PVC glue to the center of each strip.

Then I smoothed over a single sheet of tissue paper and let it dry for an hour.

I then used a magazine (it was handy) to flip over the box and tape down the tissue paper before I wrapped up the box just as I would any gift, except I made sure the ribbon did not cover any of the gifts. After it was wrapped I felt along the gift and wrote 1 thru 24 gently with a felt tip pen.

This is the only one I have ever made so I can’t show you what it looks like with one or all of the days punched through. In hindsight, I would definitely use a bigger box and pre-tape/line out the grid so it was more defined. Overall though, I am pretty happy with the idea and outcome of my first attempt!