I love the concept behind an Advent Calendar. You spend the month of December remembering Jesus through Scripture and crafts and you spend the time doing things together as a family. The past couple of years, I'm made my own advent calendar. You can see last year's
here - also made from paper. I just love this year's calendar.
This was so easy to make and you don't need a special cutter! Grab two pieces of paper, a ruler (optional), a paper slicer or scissors and some washi tape. I used two 12x12 pieces of paper. I cut my squares to 2.5"x2.5". Now, if I had done 2 inch squares, I would have only needed two pieces of paper total. But because I wanted them slightly larger, I actually needed 4 pieces. So either use your ruler and measure all the way down the page or just stick it in your paper slicer, line it up to the 2.5" mark and slice. Keep doing this until you have 25 top pieces of papers and 25 bottom pieces of papers.
Forgive my terrible lighting - I craft at night when my littles are in bed.
I used a corner puncher to round the edges but this is completely optional. Next, lay out your bottom pieces in the order you want them (I attached mine with some tape on the bottom). You could make a Christmas tree design or anything you want. Then I laid the top pieces on top and used a piece of washi tape to secure them. This makes it easy for little fingers to lift them up.
Now, here's what took the longest. I really wanted to use some gold thickers for the numbers. But they're quite expensive. I can sometimes find them for oh.so.cheap at Marshalls or TJ Max but it's super hit or miss. I checked both of mine and nothing. :-( So, I bought a piece of glitter paper and tried to cut out numbers on my Cameo. But that didn't work. So, I cut out numbers on regular card stock, put some glue on them and shook on some glitter. This was a 2 day process basically.
(Now, I know I said you don't need a fancy cutter. You could cut numbers out yourself, stencil them on there, write them on there. But I just had a specific idea in mind that I wanted to do so I opted to use my Cameo.)
I hand-cut a star out of the glitter paper I bought and then wrote Merry Christmas with regular ole chalk.
Next was to add the activities and Scripture. I am using the Scripture guide based on
Truth In the Tinsel and
The Storybook Bible. I then made a list of fun things we could do like make Christmas cookies, get new PJs, make Christmas ornaments, watch a Christmas movie, things like that.
This is also a countdown calendar for us since we will start with day 25 and count down.