Christmas count down calendar for slackers

We never got our act together early enough to make advent calendars for the whole month of December, even though I still have last year's and all I'd have to do is cut and glue more tissue paper over the cups. Total slackers!

So I figured we'd just wait until a week before Christmas to have a count down calendar. At least this way the frenzy is compressed, and with schools out either yesterday or today around here, it makes a nice post school count down, because for most kids the holiday season starts in truth when winter break kicks off.

I had a few random sweets and little cheap toy things that I'd collected and with them being all different shapes and sizes it wasn't going to be easy to find containers that would fit them all, so I decided to make sort of calzone from paper plates to put them in.

I popped the treats in the plate, folded it over and stapled it shut. I drew the number for the date on it with a sharpie and when all seven were done, I set the kids to work colouring them. I left all but the 24th blank so that they could draw thier own pictures on them, but they demanded that I draw and they colour, so we ended up with lots of random christmassy stuff coloured in on them.

The good thing about using paper plates rather than just circles of paper was that the lip of the plate made a nice space inside to fit treats, and they were sturdy enough that the kids could colour on them without squashing the treats hidden inside.

I hole punched a corner of each and threaded string to hang them, then banged some tacks into the fireplace. The kids hung them up in the correct order.

Yes, that's a green snowman you can see there. Hey, at least it's not a yellow one.

We openned the one for the 18th and the kids nommed the treat inside. Now you can see that I stuck a wee paper doily on the inside of the plate and wrote on it "7 more days to go". This way they have a little reference hanging there, and the openned pate looks kind of pretty still hanging there like a snowflake. I only had little black plates, but if you had green and red plates it would look very Christmassy.

For any of you missing the LEGO posts, there is a DUPLO themed post from my partner in crime, er, I mean parenting, over on his blog, Fangletronics. He's hacked together a very sweet little traffic light for the kids to use with thier toy cars, and it fits neatly into a little DUPLO brick housing.