Advent Calendar with Christmas Tree Ornaments

This time of year is so exciting and I have been trying to squeeze as many traditions into as possible since Brandon and I got married.  Now that Grey is old enough to get bitten by the magic of Christmas bug, I could hardly wait to involve him in some Christmas traditions.  So we picked out a tree together.

we needed a 'tall & skinny'

And then we wanted to involve him in the setting up & decorating of the tree..but he's not really old enough to understand why we had to vacuum 20 times to clean up the needles, and why it took forever for mom's pregnant belly to reach under the tree to lock it into the stand, and why we needed to remove the lights after putting them on (because half of them were burned out) and then put them back on.  He was mostly just kind of annoyed with how slow the progress was going.

So we shipped him up to bed and finished the tree ourselves while listening to Christmas music and telling Bully to stop biting the bulbs.  She still looks a little bare (because we were missing 25 ornaments), but Grey loves the lights and says "Surprise!" and claps when the timer turns them on in the evening. 

Luckily though, I had another trick up my sleeve to make sure Grey had a hand in decorating the tree. After seeing this pin earlier last month, I was instantly infatuated with the idea of creating our own Christmas Tree ornament Advent Calendar.  So after a trip to Michael's to pick up some thick paper bags (white) and some sticky foam letters - I got to crafting Grey's advent calendar.  Of the 25 ornaments, 23 of them are ones we already had from previous Christmases.  The two new ones include a little bear with a scarf (that I knew Grey would think was hilarious) and a clear bulb that I stuff a picture of booboo & bully into for Christmas morning.  All of my supplies totaled under $20, so it was a pretty big bang for my buck project.  

The numbering on the bags took the longest (and even that was only about an hour and half).  After that, it was just a long wait until Dec. 1 so that Grey could start opening them up.

Unlike the pin, I placed our bags into a basket because first, we don't have a fireplace in this house.  And secondly, all I could envision was Greyson grabbing at the bags constantly and ripping them down.  The basket works for us since I can keep it in locations too high for him to reach and it can be moved around if I need.

So each morning since the first, Grey has received a new bag to find an ornament to hang on the tree.  This kind of advent calendar not only gets him involved in the Christmas tree, but in a controlled, small-doses-at-a-time kind of way.  With my very grabby, destructive 19 month old, controlled access is really the only way of survival right now.  

Happy holiday'ing!