Advent calendars are great teaching tools for our children. Santa leaves notes to my daughters, in our Pottery Barn advent calendar. http://www.potterybarnkids.com/products/telluride-advent-calendar-new/ My older daughter really got the concept of "Counting down to Christmas" using this calendar. I've decided it's important to do this with other holidays too. We found an Thanksgiving advent calendar that reminds us to be grateful for the things in our life. Another wonderful lesson for our children. http://jellybeanjunkyard.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/tuesday-tutorial-give-thanks-gratitude-board/ This is adorable, reusable, and not accomplished in two and a half hours like she says. At least not for me. I'm thinking it's more of a four hour project. Of course, maybe I was hung up too much on the font and paper choices. Could be! A couple of hints. I used vinyl for the title and the numbers. It works wonderfully and you get to skip the gluing on step. I recommend putting the numbers on last. I mod podged mine. When you mod podge paper, it tends to warp a bit. Because the vinyl was on, it shriveled in some places. It still turned out well, but would have been better if I applied the vinyl at the end. I also decided to make bows on mine instead of just the ribbon ties. Something that helps, keep all the bows in the same place, is making a template. I just decided where the holes worked best, punched them in the template, and used the template 30 times to punch the holes in all the cards. Since I am not good at eyeballing, it kept everything in the same place and was easy! You could use this idea for every holiday.
