Advent Calendar

I know I've posted about our December advent calendar before and in case you don't know from my post a few years ago, I totally messed it up. Here's the short version of a long story:

1. Found cute sock advent calendar on Pinterest.
2. Didn't read directions, decided I was crafty enough to just go off the picture.
3. Bought a bunch of Christmas socks.
4. Thought things didn't look right when I put the socks on the strand of twine.
5. Realized that had I read the directions I would have discovered that they used baby socks.

Oops.

It worked out fine and now we have this whole Dr. Seuss thing going on with our advent calendar. The boys love it!

This year I decided to put an new spin on an old advent calendar tradition.

Over the summer my Mom bought me an Instax Mini camera. For those of you that don't know an Instax camera is a film camera that produces instant pictures about the size of a credit card. The boys and I love this camera and are always finding ways to use it.

The twine for the advent calendar and the mini clothes pins that we use to hold up the socks actually stay up year round. After all the socks had been removed the first year we did the advent calendar I liked the look of the twine under our mantle and figured I could find something to hang on it year round in place of the socks. This is were the Instax camera came in. Since the summer we started hanging up our little Instax pictures on the twine. When I was taking down the pictures so I could hang the socks for our advent calendar the light bulb in my brain turned on.

Why not use our Instax camera to take pictures of each day of the advent calendar and then replace the removed sock with the picture!?

Drew and Jackson were so excited that we would be using the camera everyday! They love it when the little picture comes out and anxiously await for the picture to show up.

I was excited to have a picture from each day to document and display our advent calendar.

We do a mix of candy, activities, crafty things, and small items throughout the calendar. Since you can't put big items in the socks, sometimes there will be a note or clue in the sock and then the item is under the tree or hidden somewhere in the house. (Last year after they were very unappreciative on one day, the next day they got a "clean your room" note. We haven't had that problem since!) Usually we do some repeating with the smaller candy. Here's a list of what our advent calendar looks like this year:

• three Hershey's kisses (the boys love the mint truffle and candy cane kisses)
• new hats and gloves
• go see "The Best Little Christmas Pageant Ever" at the Springfield Little Theater
• two mini Kit Kats
• make foam snowmen from a kit
• paint a toy soldier
• made it snow around our tree (cotton balls on fishing line hanging from the ceiling)
• a small box of Christmas jelly beans
• make Ninja bread cookies
• go to Silver Dollar City
• Cookies and Cream Hershey's Santa
• make new ornaments for the tree
• go ride the Polar Express (they get new pajamas too)
• go see Santa
• make cupcakes to take to people
• make cookies for Santa
• drive around to look at Christmas lights (there is hot chocolate involved too!)
• have Christmas movie night with a new Christmas movie, popcorn, and hot chocolate