DIY Advent Calendar

Opening an Advent calendar every morning in December was one of my favorite things about Christmas as a kid. So many of them now are filled with cheap waxy chocolate and I wanted something different, something that I could reuse every year, and there are so many great ideas on Pintrest and this is a combination of my favorites.
I filled our with all kinds of treats, Good chocolate, mini booze to go in hot chocolate or coffee, a mini game, scratch and wins and a few other little trinkets. The best part is we came up with a bunch of Christmas activities to do as well, such as going for a walk to look at the lights, decorate the house, drink rum and eggnog in front of the fire, watch Christmas movie, play a board game (with Rum and eggnog!) We wanted to try and fit in all the little things that can get missed over the busy Christmas season.

You will need
-A wooden frame
-Dowel or wire to hang
-Clothes pins
-Twine or String
-Wrapping pepper
-Paper tags
-Paint
-Things to fill your Calendar

To assemble my calendar I started with measuring where I was going to place my lines of dowel, mine are about 4.5 inches apart, it really depends on how big your frame is and how big your treats are.

I used hot glue to attach my dowel to the back of the frame. Wire or thick twine would work great too in place of the dowel, it just needs to be very tight to prevent sagging.

I hot glued clothes pins to the spots that I wanted to have activity tags or small presents, the bigger ones I just tied on.

 I did go kind of wild with the decotating of the packages (it is going to be part of my Christmas décor after all) This a good project to use up ends and left overs of washi tape, lace, ribbon, twine and what ever you have lying around the house.

 To make the numbers, I stenciled the day numbers on the little wooden tags and tied those on with red embroidery thread, and they will stay on after the treat or tag has been opened.

The calendar looks amazing on the wall (if I do say so myself) and I can’t wait until December 1st to open it!