Try making an advent calendar with a difference

Advent is just a few days away and soon it will be time to get out the Christmas decorations. While the key decoration may be the Christmas tree, the first decoration of the season is the Advent Wreath and the Advent calendar to count down to Christmas Day. Everyone puts their Christmas tree up at different times in December. If you don’t get yours until later in December and you can’t wait that long, then countdown to Christmas with your very own forest of Christmas trees Advent calendar.

Use scraps of wrapping paper to create this colourful forest or use paper in different shades of green. Plain brown paper decorated with sequins and glitter glue also looks just as festive.

Create a template on some card. Draw the shape of a Christmas tree on the card and cut out. Cut out 24 white circles, small enough to fit on the template. Number each circle from 1 to 24 and leave aside for later.

Lay the template flat on some patterned paper and trace around it. Fold the patterned paper in half and cut out. Repeat until you have 48 trees/24 pairs in total.

Take one pair of trees. To stick together, glue a wooden skewer to one of the trees and allow to dry. Repeat with all of the trees and lay each pair side by side so they don’t get muddled up. 

Act of kindness

On the trees that don’t have wooden skewers glued to them, write a little message on each one. This can be a random act of kindness for you to fulfil on the day you open the tree, or you can include snippets of the story of the Nativity story. Flip the trees over and glue the numbered circles to all of the trees. Flip the trees round again and dab just a little bit of glue at the top. Stick this to the tree with the wooden skewer. Leave the glue to dry completely. 

Trim the ends of the wooden skewers so each tree is a different height. You can display your calendar any way you want. Push the skewers through a cardboard box or some styrofoam. Or you can push a little blue tack on the end of each skewer and stick down onto a surface. 

Shuffle the numbers up rather than arranging them in chronological order, similar to an advent calendar.