Book Advent Calendar – A new tradition

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I saw this idea and absolutely loved it.  Truly I couldn’t wait to go through our books and find all our Christmas/holiday books.  We have quite the collection.  I found a darling new book for a great deal to add to our books and I know the kids are going to love it.

Do you know what a Book Advent Calendar is?

Basically it’s pretty self explanatory.  You grab all your Christmas/holiday/winter themed books and wrap them up.  Depending on if you want to go buy more to make sure you have 24 or just use what you have that is the day you’ll start your countdown (if you have 12 books do the 12 days of Christmas and start on the 12th, if you have 20 books you’ll start on the 4th..).

We’ll be starting tomorrow on the 1st and doing 23 books because we will read the story of Christ’s birth from the scriptures on the 24th.  Each night one of the kids will get to pick a book and open it and then we’ll read it together as a family.  Since we love Christmas and we love to read pretty much this is a win-win for all of us.

Since (sadly) we don’t have our tree up yet I decided to wrap up a box we had and turned that into our spot for all the books.  I think we’ll keep the wrapped and already opened books in there so the kids can continue to look through them as the season goes on (unless this becomes an issue with books trying to get opened earlier then we’ll find a new location for the opened books).  I figure once we have the tree up my cute box can go under it pretty easily.

I really do love this idea.  Trying to do some sort of chocolate type countdown for each of the kids could become a disaster (I swear they’d just try to eat them all in 1 night).

Couple of recommendations if you choose to do this project.  Do not worry about buying new books!  Go to your local thrift stores.  I bet you’ll be shocked at what you can find (and probably at how much you’ll save).  Also, don’t be concerned about buying them all this year.  Maybe get a few and then go to your library and check some out to supplement your list.  I’ve seen many varieties of this, some where they’ve actually put a tag on each gift with the day # on it and if you were borrowing from the library and worried about having them read and ready to return before they were due that is a great way to make sure it’s read before the due date.  Plus, imagine your child’s excitement to read a book that they haven’t read already.  I always take advantage of the library system.  I go through and put a whole bunch of seasonal books on hold and then go pick them up all at once and we love getting to read new books, keeps the kids excited.

We’ve got a great assortment of books ranging from board books to little bit longer stories like the Christmas Orange.  A friend told me that they also use their Christmas movies in their countdown.  I don’t know if I could do that because I seriously love watching all our movies the whole season but I love the idea of it 🙂 reminds me of back when we were little and we waited for all those Christmas specials to come on TV and that was when we saw them (not sure what my kids would think of that idea…only seeing the movie once the holiday season).

Needless to say there is no right or wrong way to do this tradition and there is no need to worry about not having done it in the past.  I have no doubt that even my 13 year old will enjoy sitting with the family and reading a story (and I fully intend to have the older kids do the reading on their nights to pick the books).

I am so excited and I’ll be sure to be back to report how it’s going along the way!