You have acquired, built, sewn, bartered, or were given the perfect Dalek-themed advent calendar that most uniquely represents your family's true geek essence. Now the question is, how do you fill up the 25 spaces? If you're grunting at the idea of giving your kids daily sweets or buying them even more stuff, an activity-based advent calendar may be the perfect solution. Fill in each date with a note describing a surprise activity! It's the perfect to get you and yours in the holiday mood, while providing the kiddos special activities to occupy those long dark boring evenings stuck inside.
Too last minute to plan 25 activities today? You don't need to! Your kiddo is only supposed to open one door per day, meaning you only need to stay one day ahead of the game. Plan as you go and adjust the next day's surprise activity according to the weather, your schedule, and everyone's energy level. They'll never know you didn't plan the whole thing months ahead of time.
Moreover, we're here to help you find a few perfect advent calendar activities!
1. Bake cookies. This Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe seems to be a crowd-pleaser and it has a fun meme story to go with it!
2. Teach your kids the true meaning of Christmas by let them participate in giving back to the community.
3. Throw a BYOB - Bring Your Own Box - party! Invite a few friends to bring boxes and build a whole cardboard village in your living room. Win major mom points by allowing your kids to camp in their boxes for a night!
4. Explore nine smarty pants ways to enjoy snow. Learn to recognize snowflake shapes, or hold a snowflake photography competition!
5. Bust cabin fever! Give them a roll of tape or give them permission to setup the ultimate house-wide obstacle course. (Provided they clean up the mess!)
6. Create a Rube Goldberg machine. This one is for the older kids, but it is sure to keep them busy for a few hours, or a few days! Better yet, make them add one simple machine to the sequence per day, then run the whole Rube Goldberg machine on Christmas morning. This project becomes the advent calendar.
7. Make a Christmas ornament using a new technique. It's the perfect weather to learn how to sow, knit, crochet, paint, or whatever strikes your fancy.
8. Upcycle! Set your kids loose in the recycle bin, the objective is to create a new music instrument. Finish the day with a concert, let your new band geeks play their own instruments along to their favorite Christmas music album. Those who's instrument survives two whole songs without falling apart win extra marshmallows in their hot chocolates!
9. Are a few family members down with the flu? Movie marathon! The hardest will be to decide which trilogy, Star Wars or Back to the Future?
10. Is everyone bursting at the seem with extra-silly energy? Make a home movie to send to the grandparents, or show off to the whole Interwebz.
11. If your neck of the woods isn't too frigid, enjoy a drive-in movie. This is something many of us have never experienced, let alone our kids!
12. Don't let the birds be angry! Keep your local avian friends fed and happy with a homemade bird seed wreath.
13. Break out your best paper, it's origami time.
14. Make Space Invaders cookies. Or challenge your geeklets to recreate their own favorite 8-bit video game characters with cookie dough!
15. Candy! Ok, I don't want to give my kiddo undeserved candy or gifts every day, but that doesn't mean I have to ban candy all together. Have the note direct your child to the location of the next note, and so on and so forth until your child can treasure hunt his or her way to the loot!
16. On a different day, you can reuse the same idea but use a different technique. Have today's note be a map to the candy loot. Build up those map reading skills!
17. Oh yeah, you're on a roll, keep on going! Use coordinates to pinpoint them to the next day's treat. Geocaching, FTW!
18. Have the kids create their own geocache and register it on Geocaching.com for someone else to find. A little Christmas gift for the next treasure hunter!
19. Need a gift for their teachers? Have the kiddo help pick or make the present, it'll take something off your to-do list and it will be more personal.
20. Check out the calendar of events at your local attractions, like zoos and museums. Chances are you can knock a few days off your planning list by piggybacking on their special activities.
21. Backwards day! Dinner for breakfast, breakfast for dinner. Let your geeklets find how many things they can really do backwards. Maybe they'll make you breakfast and do the dishes for a change?
22. Make Star Wars snowflakes! Need I say more?
23. Spice up your holiday drinks! Serve warm hot cocoa in shot glasses or mini dixie cups, and have the kids go wild in the spice pantry. Many concoctions will probably be disgusting, but they'll be amused and learn their spices at the same time! Who knows, they might surprise you with a salted caramel hot cocoa or a spicy Mayan variation with cinnamon and cayenne pepper. Yum! You can play too, think you can one-upmanship Starbucks?
24. Go to the library and borrow Christmas books, it's quiet day! Challenge your geeklets to a whole day without vocal communication or noise (that includes TV and video games too). You're welcome.
25. It's Christmas day! Today's note can just read, "Open presents!" You can get more creative, but seriously, no one's going to care when there are presents to open and new toys to play with!
Does your family do activity-based advent calendars? Please share your favorite advent activities in the comments!
