Advent Calendar

This year we decided to do a family advent countdown devotional. We are using Thriving Family's outline which you can find at http://www.thrivingfamily.com/Features/Magazine/2011/advent/2011-advent-calendar-week-1.aspx
We are looking forward to introducing Desiring God's advent devotion guide as well. You can find it at
 http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/free-advent-devotional-guide
We believe it is important that you teach children the true meaning of Christmas and not leave to it just being about being good to receive presents from Santa. Don't get me wrong we totally go all out with Santa. We make the cookies, egg nog, write letters, and even have a family tradition of having Fenwick the elf visit the kids. If that is all our kids walked away with each year then we would be failing them as parents and giving them a false hope. It is vital that they know that the core meaning of Christmas is about the birth of Jesus and that He was sent to earth to live a perfect holy life and to die for us horrific sinners because of His righteous grace and love for us.

The kids and I thought it would be fun to make our own advent countdown calendar this year. It was pretty simple and we just used leftover scrapbooking material to make it.

We just added string to connect papers, punched out circles and added christmas stickers to make the beneath pictures, used premade squares to write the numbers on, and then hot glued the squares above the circles.

 Adi and Noah had fun writing the countdown numbers on the squares

Adi was excited to life the first number :)