Advent Calendar

I have been wanting to put together a special calendar for Advent for several years now, but this is the first year that I’ve actually managed to get it all thought out and put together before December first rolled around.

I looked at various websites and blogs for ideas and finally settled on a Baby Sock Advent Calendar. There are several different blogs I ran across that posted pictures of finished Baby Sock Advent Calendars, but I believe the idea originally was made popular by Martha Stewart.

You can click here to view the steps for making Martha’s Baby Sock Advent Calendar.

Here is the Baby Sock Advent Calendar that I put together for our family this past Friday night.

Baby Sock Advent Calendar

I purchased most of the baby socks for our Advent calendar from Target. A few of the socks were unmatched strays that I had lying around the house.

I strung the baby socks using wood clothespins and a bulky weight red yarn, things I happened to have lying around the house. I had originally planned to use Christmas-themed ribbon to string the socks on, but the ribbon I wanted to use didn’t seem strong enough, so I switched to the yarn. The socks got kind of heavy, so I needed to buy big push pins from K-Mart to push into my mantle to help hold up the yarn and socks. Fortunately, there were already a bunch of holes in the mantle from a previous owner, so I didn’t have to feel bad about putting holes in the wood. 🙂

I also labeled the top of each clothespin with a number for each day until Christmas. I used a silver Sharpie. You can’t see the numbers too well from far away, but it is just fine close up. I didn’t want to use black because I thought it would be too dark in contrast to the lighter colored socks, and I happened to have the silver marker lying around. Besides, silver is more festive.

My plan is to put something into one of the socks each night before I go to bed, something for the kids to look forward to each morning until Christmas. I plan to use an assortment of things from notes suggesting a fun activity to do for the day to some kind of small, sweet treat. A lot will probably depend on what our schedule for the day is. We probably won’t have time for a complicated holiday art project on days that we have a lot of running to do.

Calendar close-up