25 Days of Christmas!

This year I decided to do a homemade Advent calendar. I always used to buy the ones with the little chocolate for each day for my husband and I... I don't really mind the thought of the one little chocolate each day for Little Man, but my main concern is that the chocolate is so gross and waxy. Plus, there are lots of Christmas activities I'm planning to try to fit in with Little Man this year. So I decided to do a homemade Advent calendar - one of the type where you write an activity on a piece of paper for each day. Andrea describes it here and here. I'm not crafty though, so was planning to look for some kind of store-bought calendar I could use... I was originally thinking of the ones I used to see at Starbucks when I lived near one that had a little drawer for each day. But then I found a super-cute mini-stocking garland from Avon that I think is just perfect. There is a picture of it in the top left corner here. 

I love it! I will hang it on the mantle in between our regular stockings. I bought a few treats to sneak in on some of the less-exciting days - mini candy-canes, small bags of gummy treats, etc. There will also be occasional days that have small presents associated with them. For example, I'm thinking Day 1 might involve some new X-mas books. And for the "Christmas dance party" day, I found a Christmas sing-a-long DVD with songs from the classic Christmas movies (Rudolph, Frosty, etc.). I've been scouring the internets for ideas, and here is the list I came up with so far - obviously I'll need to sit down with our calendar and narrow it down. 

• Have hot chocolate with all the fixings
• Write and mail letters to Santa
• Use puppets to tell Christmas bedtime story
• Special food (e.g., chocolate chip pancakes or other big breakfast, etc.)
• Make decorations for the tree
• Drink hot chocolate from Xmas mugs
• take a picture in our santa/elf hats
• Have a camp out /indoor picnic around the christmas tree
• Wrap a toy and take it to a charity christmas tree
• Make handmade something for relatives (crafts) - cards or crafts to mail to family
• Christmas dance party
• Christmas movies
• Wildlife park
• Walk/Drive to see the Christmas lights (drive in PJs with hot chocolate/apple cider)
• Special christmas Eve activities (open new PJs, put out reindeer food, cookies for santa, etc.)
• visiting particular people or having people over
• make/decorate sugar cookies
• put up tree/christmas decorations
• make paper snowflakes (and decorate the house/windows with them?)
• wrap presents or prep daycare teacher presents
• christmas craft/collage/coloring pages
• special activities (library, x-mas parties, etc.)
• some kind of visiting/give-aways to neighbours, family, etc. (ornaments, cookies, etc.)
• christmas picture with santa at the mall
• food to food bank
• skating
• santa claus parades?
• make a gingerbread house
• make x-mas birdfeeders
• winter walk with hot chocolate or apple cider
• Big Man's birthday/birthday party
• go to the bookstore and pick out a new christmas book
• make christmas rice krispie squares
• family swim
• go to the video store to rent a christmas movie
• get christmas movies/books from the library
• special Dec 1 gift (new Xmas book?)