So, I have been on a mission the past 6 months or so scouring yard sales and thrift shops for seasonal books to add to my son’s library (Valentine’s Day books are the hardest to find for some reason!) and have amassed quite a Christmas/Winter collection!  Needless to say I was thrilled to come across all the ideas for using holiday books as an Advent calendar for children!  That, and the Pinteresty Advent calendar I spent DAYS making at the last minute last year was just sad, so incredibly sad.

I think the hardest part of this project was selecting the books and keeping the choices down to just 25!  We have a wide variety of Christmas books ranging from board books to picture books to easy readers to chapter stories and with fun titles from the classic tales I remember as a child, authors that I loved as a teacher, contemporary stories that are new to us, and absolutely beautiful faith-based books retelling the birth of our savior Jesus.

The “How-To” for this project is pretty simple:

Choose 25 different Christmas books:  

• You can find lots of inexpensive children’s books at yard sales, thrift stores, consignment shops, used book stores, library sales, Craigslist, or on Facebook “Buy, Sell, Trade” groups.  My “buy” price for used books is about $1, maybe a little more for a hard-to-find book or particular author or series that I am collecting.
• You could also pool your local “mommy” resources and hold a Holiday Book Swap!  Trade titles your kiddos have outgrown or that you have tired of reading (!) and start adding new titles to your seasonal library.

• Many libraries have long checkout periods (ours is 3 weeks) so this project could be done on the cheap by adding borrowed books.

• If you have an e-reader, you could borrow or purchase e-books to save on time and money spent.  Although your Advent calendar would become portable should you be traveling this December, I think it would lose the tactile and visual feel that young kiddos would get from unwrapping the books themselves.
• This calendar can also be easily adapted to fit older kids.  Instead of choosing 25 different story books, maybe select a few Christmas-themed chapter books and read aloud a few chapters a night.  Books like Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder would be great to read aloud as a family.  I LOVED reading Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli to my 4th – 6th graders and the Christmas storyline always got me teary!  Darn butterscotch crumpets!

 Wrap each book:

•  I had a stash of $0.25 wrapping paper I purchased on clearance last January so the cost of materials was fairly inexpensive.  And luckily for my OCD, I was able to find several coordinating papers!
• You could use recycled materials to wrap like old newspapers, magazines, paper bags, or even the pages of a discarded book!
• I kept my wrapping simple (as wrapping 25 books can become very tedious after about book #7!), but you could add ribbons and bows and all of that to each “present”.  I liked the simple look of just the wrapping paper.
• Yes, the wrapping was a little time-consuming, but it really seemed to fly by with a good movie on, a hot cup of coffee, and some yummy snacks!  Invite friends over for a “wrap party” or maybe catch up with someone on Skype, open a bottle of wine, and chat and wrap away!

Number or label the books:

•  You can add “countdown” numbers to the books with stamps, stickers, labels, etc. or just leave the night’s story a random choice!
• If you do label your books with numbers, the countdown becomes a holiday math lesson!  Leave them in numerical order for younger kids and count along the book “number line”; leave them in a random order for a fun “number hunt”; practice subtraction skills with “we had 25 books and have read 6 so far, how many are left?”, etc.
• I wanted to be sure that a few of the books were strategically placed in our countdown, so I wrapped those particular books in red paper to be sure their reading fell on the right nights. 

Displaying your Advent book calendar:

• You can display your Advent books on a mantel piece or on a shelf near the Christmas tree, but I think we are going to leave our books in a basket near my son’s bed.  That way he can choose a new story every night and can visually see how many more days until Christmas first thing in the morning…..before he runs to ask Mama or Daddy “How many more days?!”  =)

Here are the 25 books (in no particular order) I chose to add to our family’s (new) traditional Advent calendar:

We will be traveling overseas when we should be starting our countdown, so for the days we will miss, I have chosen the smallest lightweight paperback books to bring along with us on our travels.  I am also really excited about searching the bookshops in Hungary and finding some “local” Christmas story favorites for our family!  Merry Christmas y’all!  ♥