Our Advent - 2014

Daddy's birthday always goes together with the start of our Advent. This year there's a little extra. The Book Advent Calendar.

First of all, here is our traditional, bought in a shop (Tchibo) advent calendar:

horrible photo, but I don't have any other

I always put it on the door frame. Each shape has a pocket and I put in some surprises:

• some treats (dried fruit, nuts, crackers, marzipan - E.'s favourite, etc.)
• advent activities from Időtetrisz  (you can download the cards for free - Christmassy crafts, acts of kindness, gift giving, funny. If you want something similar in English you can download Jen's advent calendar activity cards from this link. Időtetrisz offers some blank cards, so I wrote some of my own in English. E. can't read yet anyways, so I can read the Hungarian cards in English if she is in an English mood)
• a small animal (I bought these last year in a secondhand toy shop - they were really inexpensive)

The animals are for putting together the stable where baby Jesus was born. We've just started it, but I'll add a photo of it when you can see what it looks like.

UPDATE:

Here it is:

E. wanted to add the Christmas tree and the snow ball

Extra advent book calendar - a book a day

I saw plenty of great advent present ideas on Pinterest, however, the best is the 24 books wrapped up. Your child can open one a day up to Christmas. It's great if you can collect 24 Christmas stories. I couldn't. I had about 12-15 book I'd bought earlier but there was no occasion to give them to E. So I bought some more discounted books, and some more new ones from Book Depository (if you order from them there's no delivery fee). This is how I collected 24 books. (The cost of the books altogether was between 6-10 thousand HUF = 19-33 EUR)

Here is about half of the books:

I didn't take a photo of the other half but I will after we have opened all of them. I'll also put together a list of the titles, authors and E.'s reaction to them. This post will come after Christmas.

My Mum helped me wrap all the 24 books. I made the stickers out of cheap, circle-shaped post-its and a white gel pen. (It took a while until the white gel dried on the post-its)

We've already read two of the books:

• Me and My Dad 
• Dora's chilly day

Both of them were bullseye. 

Let's not leave out our unconventional advent candles. I can't call it an advent wreath because they are made up of 4 porcelain cups, Christmassy washi  tape, fake grass, 4 Christmas tree decorations stuck on the cups, 4 sparkly, red balls and 4 long, claret candles. No wreath whatsoever.

But it's easy and fun to make it even with a smaller child.

Last year E. helped me make it

So our advent has begun and we are very excited about opening the little pockets on our advent calendar and reading a new book every day. Only Christmas Eve can be more exciting than this.