I just love the holidays! I get so excited, I tend to take on too much. But I love it all!

One major part of celebrating the holidays is counting down to Christmas. That means advent calendars. Not just one. No, in our house, we have seven. Yup, you read that right. Seven!

1. There is the German word-a-day paper chain calendar. You can make one, too. Check out this post from last year with all the details on how-to and downloadable templates.

2. My favorite is probably the advent calendar my mom made before I was born. It’s made from felt with 25 pockets and little felt objects to pin on a felt Christmas tree. It’s a real family heirloom now.

3. We have a Playmobil advent calendar.

4. And last year I took a holiday Lego set and made it into an advent calendar, too. Each day, the kids get a few new pieces to add to the project. It goes in order of the building steps. But someone told me of an idea of taking a set and just separating the pieces randomly. The kids can build their own creations each day. And on the final day, they get the instructions to build the actual set. Fun!

5. AP4 made a cute calendar for the kids. She took two pieces of cardstock and glued them together. The top piece is one big picture. She cut the “windows” out of that and numbered them. The piece behind it has clues to a fun activity she will do with the kids after the holidays. We’ll see when they figure it out!

6. Last year, the mother of AP3 sent us a musical advent calendar. There is a different holiday song to be played each day! And you can switch between German and English! It’s really cool!

7. Finally, I make a teabag advent calendar for our au pair. Each day has a different teabag! It’s a bit of a challenge for those who prefer to drink tea without caffeine. But I keep a pretty good stash of various teas in the house. Then I raid my mom’s stash 🙂  And I fill in with whatever variety packs I can find.

I made the teabag advent calendar with a small bulletin board. I wrapped it in pretty red, holiday-printed fabric. My mom helped me stretch it over the board and staple it down using a staple gun. Two sets of hands were definitely better one for this job! I found vellum envelopes and 2-and-a-half-inch round labels at Paper Source. I bought some holiday number stickers online, but you can also make your own. I found some pretty holiday number printables online last year, too. I put the round labels onto the envelopes before I applied the numbers. The numbers showed up better that way, and the labels also helped to hide the flavor of the teabag. The teabags fit snugly into the little envelopes. Then I used straight pins with colored balls on the end (I just used red and white) to tack the bags onto the board.

I’m a little sad this year that I did not do a book-a-day. I used to take our Christmas books – including the Dutch Sinterklaas books, the German Nikolaus books, and the German Christmas books – and wrap them up, so the kids would have a book each day to read. I did not buy all new books! I just wrapped the ones we already had.