Merry christmas with a 100% upcycled advent calendar

happy holidays to all of you out there!

i’ve been wanting to write about my advent calendar for the past few weeks or so, but i never had the time and now it’s a bit late, but i guess it’s always an idea for next year!

this year i saw a lot of ideas for making advent calendars, that is, the type that you open up a door or something else to get a little gift each day of december before christmas. but in the end i decided to copy the 3-D calendar that my mother had for me when i was little. but with 100% upcycled materials, of course!

so first i got the biggest (and cleanest) cardboard box i could find from the trash and cut out the shape of a tree with 6 branches per side. then i traced the shape onto another part of the cardboard to get two pieces more or less the same. then i made a slit from the top down to the middle on one and a slit from the bottom up to the middle on the other. that way they slide into each other and can stand up. and finally, a cardboard star with a slit from the bottom to slip it on top. then my little girl and i painted the tree green and the star yellow. when the star paint was still wet, i put it in a plate of gold glitter.

when it was completely dry, we decorated the tree with glitter glue. then i put the numbers 1 to 24 on the branches. this way each branch is the day that you open the little goodie inside.

and now for the “packages.” i thought a lot about what to use. after a while i thought of using plastic easter eggs, the ones used for easter egg hunts in the USA, but it didn’t seem particularly upcyclish. then i thought of the inner eggs in kinder eggs. i heated up the tip of an ice pick on the gas burner on the stove and burned a little hole in the top of each egg. then i put a little loop through each hole to hang them from and then the fun part of decorating them with sequins, ribbon, sharpies, etc. the one thing i learned didn’t work well was glitter glue, which wipes right off the plastic surface. i don’t buy kinder eggs for my daughter, so i had to ask all our small friends to save theirs for us to use, which is why our calendar is still half-empty. oh well, we’ll be ready next december for sure!

so, i’ll let you get on to your celebrations and wish you all the happiest of holidays!!

UPDATE: If you’d like some fun ideas for what to put inside the advent calendar each day, take a look at this post on one year’s advent calendar countdown and at the advent calendar stuffer category!