Advent Calendars

Another great Christmas tradition I have always had is the advent calendar! (Well I don't have one this year...)

Normally we always had ones like this:

The cheap basic advent calendar with a piece of Christmas themed chocolate to count down to Christmas starting on the first of December. It was one of the few times a year that I got to eat chocolate in the morning since I would usually eat my piece before school. Delicious!

Well me being me, I was thinking of Christmas with my future chillins. And I was thinking of what traditions we would have with them for Christmas.

I came to think about an ornament advent calendar. I imagined pockets with an ornament in each pocket that you would use to decorate a small tree with.

Something kind of like this:

 I would probably put it on the wall or have it actually hanging up. I do like the picture frame too.

Clearly it isn't enough to just have a random set of ornaments to hang on the tree, so I would need a theme. And since we want to have at least two kids, we really need two themes.

Last Friday I managed to convince Dylan to go to the Christmas store (16 rooms of Christmas!) that sells tons of ornaments. I had never been myself and it was AMAZING. After walking it through it one time we finally settled on a Santa set and a snowman set. There were a ton of cute ideas, but without knowing what my kids will be into, I figured we wanted to go with generic and Christmasy.

My intention was just to look and see what there was, and then buy them after Christmas when they were on sale, but I just couldn't help myself.

We got two Santas and two snowmen. For now we will build one set that includes both and then by the time the second child comes around we can them into two separate sets. We figured we did want to start sooner rather than later since buying 24 ornaments at once would be rough.

Check them out:

Snowman from claymation Rudolph

Santa from claymation Rudolph

Snowman on skilift

Star Santa (there was a snowman one too, but we loved the skiing one!)

It was so much fun shopping for ornaments :) Worst comes to worst, we can use them for our tree!

I plan on using the advent ornaments for our child's first Christmas, obviously we will decorate it for the first years and then they will help out more and more. We are trying to get the less breakable kind... we'll see how long that lasts.

How is that for some planning?!

Have you had advent calendars? Do you have the typical chocolate kind or something else?