Advent activities in Australia
We’re just a few days off the start of Advent, which according to the Christian calendar is the period including the four Sundays before Christmas. According to the chocolate calendar manufacturers, it is the 24 day countdown from the 1st of December until Christmas Eve.
When I was a child, Advent was eagerly anticipated as the time we opened a door on a calender each day, to uncover the small chocolate inside. One year, I had a spectacular calender which contained a small silver charm behind each door which I was thrilled about.
With my own girls, we started off doing chocolate calenders each year…then one Advent, about eight years ago, I decided to do an Advent activities calendar. It was such a hit with the girls that I have had to repeat it every year since.
Each November I suggest that perhaps they’re past it…and maybe we don’t need to do one again this year. But, no. The Impossible Princess insists that Advent means an Advent activities calendar. Or as she calls it, ‘the envelopes’.
Basically, what I do is draw up a list of fun activities, one for each day of Advent, seal them up into numbered envelopes and the girls take turns to open the appropriate envelope each morning.
The activities include things like:
- Buying and putting up the Christmas tree
- Going to our local Carols night
- Seeing the Melbourne Myer Christmas windows
- Making paper snowflakes for the windows
- Cooking a Christmas item (e.g. gingerbread house, meringue Christmas tree)
- Going shopping for gifts to put under the charity tree at our nearest shopping centre
- Painting our toenails in Christmas colours
- Having their photo taken with Santa (there’s a bit of resistance to this one now that they are 11 and 17!
- Watching a Christmas movie with popcorn
- Wearing fancy dress for dinner
- Putting up the tent and camping out overnight in the backyard
Spreading out all the various Advent activities over the 24 day period creates a real sense of anticipation about Christmas Day. It also results in many memorable moments. One year, the first activity was to create a daily scrapbook album of each of the Advent activities, so we took photos each day, printed them out, and the girls made a lovely album which records what they did each day.
It takes a bit of organising to make sure the activities don’t clash with other things in the diary, and that I have any materials required already at hand. Sometimes, logistics overtake us and the allocated activity for that day just doesn’t get done…but we just hold it over and do it on another day. No stress.
I try to change up the design of the envelopes each year. For a couple of years I used folded origami paper envelopes in a gold box, but then I refreshed the format with seed envelopes. Originally I used regular clothes pegs to pin the envelopes to a length of red beads left over from The Impossible Princess’s birthday party, but in the years since, I’ve found star pegs and Christmas letter pegs.
Of course, if you happen to be travelling over the holiday period, it involves a bit of extra thought to organise appropriate Advent activities for your destination. The great thing is that the envelopes are light and portable, so it is easy to take the remaining ones with you.
In 2012, we spent Christmas in Vietnam, so I made sure that the activities on the days we were there were things that could be easily achieved while travelling, such as:
- Dec 18: Go to Vietnam (the girls rolled their eyes at this one!)
- Dec 19: Have Christmas haircuts in Ho Chi Minh
- Dec 20: Have icecreams somewhere in Ho Chi Minh
- Dec 21: Take photos with the Ho Chi Minh Christmas lights
- Dec 22: Buy t-shirts at the markets to sleep in on Christmas Eve
- Dec 23: Say hello to the girls in Yaly tailors in Hoi An and order some clothes
- Dec 24: Hang stockings and leave food for Santa and the reindeer
While in the past I’ve drawn up the list of activities in secret, this year The Impossible Princess has asked if she can write some of the activities to be included, but not know which day they will appear – which sounds like a great idea to me.
I’ll be posting photos of this year’s finished calendar on Instagram and Facebook, so follow me there if you’d like to see the end result!
How do you mark the Advent countdown?
This post is linked up to:
#WeekendWanderlust hosted by A Brit and a Southerner, Justin plus Lauren, Carmen’s Travel Trips, Outbound Adventurer, and A Southern Gypsy.
