Last Minute DIY Advent Calendar

Hi! Today I have a different post than usual, but I am excited to share it with you! For anyone needing a last minute advent calendar or countdown to Christmas idea this post is for you. I am going to be showing you how to make an easy and creative advent calendar. This was actually a happy accident :) We ordered a regular, beautiful wooden advent calendar (this one) for Avery this year with the individual boxes, but it arrived super damaged :( Since it was a couple days before December we had to get creative. We still wanted to be able to do an advent calendar, but we didn’t have time to order another one. My amazing husband actually came up with the great idea to use gift bags that he found on Amazon to act as our advent calendar (here). These come in a pack of 24 which is perfect for an advent calendar. I ended up liking these gift bags way more because you can fit bigger toys into them. The toys we ordered wouldn’t have fit into the original advent calendar so this idea worked out amazing! Don’t you love when that happens? So that is what I am going to show you today! Our last minute DIY Christmas Advent Calendar!

I think it turned out really cute and Avery loves it!! Each morning she gets to open a new bag with a little toy inside. Again my fun and loving husband decided we should do a different Fisher Price Little People figurine everyday and I loved the idea! And more importantly Avery loves it! She takes them all over the house throughout the day and I love that you can buy sets of these on Amazon. We picked up a Frozen set, Toy Story set, Disney Princess (plus random dwarf) set and a Farm Animal set. We were able to get everything shipped super quick because everything we ordered was Amazon Prime, which saved our countdown to Christmas idea.

These little bags are so cute and come with little Christmas characters to stick on each bag with the little sticky pieces included. This made everything so easy! It doesn’t have numbers on them so we just wrote those on the characters. I just used a black sharpie because that is what we had at the time, but I think you could get really creative with how you do the numbers. You could do stickers, paint pens, colored sharpies, etc. Next year I will be doing that!

I also love that the bags come with the ribbon already pre cut and ready to go! All you have to do is poke out the holes (they are pre punched) and string it through. It did take awhile to assemble all of these since we decided to do them all in one night, but to make it more enjoyable we just put on a movie and my husband and I did it together. It is definitely easier if you have help, but if not you can always do this project by yourself. I would just pop on a Christmas movie and split it up into chunks of time to make it more doable.

I am so glad with how this turned out and Avery is a fan! We look forward to placing a new bag every night for her on our fireplace and she gets excited every morning to open them. The one thing I did learn from this is that something can look completely ruined at first, but if you pause, think creatively and be willing to deviate from your original vision you can think of something pretty great. Ultimately it doesn’t have to be perfect to be special. Hope you guys enjoyed this post and maybe it gave you some inspiration.

Thanks for reading and Happy Holidays!

Nicole