Do you have an Advent calendar or some sort of Christmas countdown craft in your home?

As a kid, we never had one in our home, but I want to start a family tradition of having something to count the days down until Christmas starting with December 1st. Last year, I wrote 24 different activities for Going Mom and I to do each day until Christmas. They were folded up, placed in a big glass vase and we’d randomly pick one.

Problem was, though, the activities required time and more effort than we could give on any particular day. If there was one we couldn’t do, we’d just push it off and plan on doing several during the weekend. Nope, that never happened either!

While it was a fun though, I didn’t think it through enough; some things were just too complicated. So, this year, I thought ahead and made my own Advent/Christmas Countdown craft with things we could easily do each day.

Instead of randomly picking an activity, I assigned the tasks for each day. I didn’t get creative with the list, and actually just made things that we would most likely do that day anyway. It’s a win-win, right? Hey, this way we’re not pushing anything off!

To give you an idea of my activities, at least 10 of the days is just us working with Avery on walking and finding a reason to cheers each other. We normally split a beer or have some wine and will cheers each other every day; it’s tradition now!

The weekends are a little more involved, and include things like watching a Christmas movie or taking Avery to see Santa. We were left with just enough paper plates from Avery’s 1st birthday party and I figured they’d be great to use for making my own “dadvent” activity calendar.

With the help of Google and Pinterest, I collected enough paper plate craft ideas to put what we had to use.

Here’s what you need:

• 25 paper plates
• A printer or just pen and paper
• Almost empty glue stick (bonus points if it’s purple)
• Some sort of twine or string (had some Kelley bought for the birthday party)
• Mini clothespins (also from the birthday party) or another way to hang the plates

That’s it! Of course you could definitely use more, but I specialize in not-so-pretty DIY crafts, so this is how I do things! 🙂

As you might imagine, creating a dadvent calendar is fairly simple; all you do is print or write out 25 activities of your own to do with your family every day in December up to Christmas. The last days don’t matter since Christmas is over and we have new things to play with now.

Take your plates and either with printed numbers or a marker, number the back of each one from 1 to, yep, you guessed it, 25!

Cut your activities into strips and glue them on the opposite side of each plate. If you have activities you want for specific days, I suggest numbering each one so you don’t mix them up.

In numerical order, attach the plates to your string and you’re done! This is what we did on the 8th…

I planned on hanging them across the fireplace or make them in the shape of a Christmas tree somewhere on one of our walls, but that seemed too complicated and my wife does not allow holes in the wall. So I figured it was best not to hang and just let them lay on the floor.

Every day since, Kelley has gone into the room to pick the plate of the day for us to follow, and unlike last year, we’re doing great at keeping up!

Here are a couple of my inspirations….

And here’s my finished product!

Don’t be jealous.

Are you ready to make your own? I’d love to see pictures of what you have if you do anything similar.

FYI – I know we’re already into December and this is a late post, but that only adds to the awesomeness that is “DAD”!