40 great ideas to fill up your advent calendar
Advent calendars are a wonderful way to count down to the upcoming celebration of Christmas. Whether you’ve crafted something special or have a family heirloom you pull out each year, it can be a struggle to find 25 items to fill the calendar with.
Before you resort to the chocolate aisle, here are a few ideas to consider!
Firstly, how big are the pockets? If your advent calendar has tiny spaces to hold the treat, you might like to consider vouchers or promise or activity notes. This could be such things as:
- Let’s go look at the festive lights tonight!
- Time to make Christmas crafts
- Kids choose the ingredients for tonight's dinner!
- Create a video clip of family Christmas wishes to send to family overseas
- Today we’ll decorate the Christmas tree
- Dad will take Louie and Charlotte to JUMP
- Who wants to help make Christmas cookies?
- We’ve got tickets to…
- Today we’re buying gifts for a Christmas Shoebox (there are a few organisations that do this. Try here and here)
- Dad's famous pancakes for breakfast!
- Trip to visit Santa
- Pick out a gift for someone in need
- Watch our favourite Christmas movie with popcorn and hot chocolates
- Let’s make fudge for the neighbours!
- Christmas party at kindy today!
- Picnic at the park with friends
- Assemble and decorate a gingerbread house
- Write a letter to Santa or
- Create a video of the kids telling Santa how their year has been!
- Let’s dress up super-Christmassy, and take a family photo!
It’s worth noting that some of the activities can be ones that were in the diary anyway, you’ll just have to make sure they go into the advent calendar on the right date! Same with other date specific activities or making sure you choose “day at the beach” on a weekend if you’re working during the week.
Want to mix it up with sweets, notes and little gifts? We’ve some ideas on small fun items that can be included:
- Stickers
- Christmassy cookie cutters
- Friendship bracelets
- Glow sticks
- Finger puppets
- Bubble bath
- Fun socks
- Lego minifigures
- Dollhouse furniture
- Fun pens/pencils
- Seed packets
- Crayons
- small puzzle
- bath crayon
- Hair ties
- Hand ball
- Bubbles
- A real coin for their money box
- A Christmas decoration
- Buy a bag of animal figurines and pop one in every few days to collect up their own zoo. Other figurine collections work too!
And if you’d like to share the Christmas story with your children, there are countdowns available with a bible verse each day describing the Nativity story. It can be a lovely touch to have a Christmas ornament or piece of a nativity scene to put into place each day that correlates with the verse. Check out this free printable from the happy home fairy.