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One of my favorite traditions that we started as a family is our Advent Books. I always had a chocolate advent calendar as a child, and there was always so much excitement each day in opening the advent gift and tearing off a piece of green or red paper from my construction paper countdown chain.
the history
I love the idea of counting down together as a family, and during my first holiday season as a mom, I posted on Facebook asking my friends and family what their favorite traditions were with their kids. One of my friends shared that every night she lets her kids open a different Christmas book. How simple and special. I started the following year when my oldest was old enough to understand and enjoy the tradition. The problem I ran into was that due to him being two years old, he didn’t understand why he couldn’t open every book that was under the tree. I decided I needed to help him understand that one book a day could also be seen as a countdown, and the number of books left under the tree is how many days until Christmas. The following year it worked, and our Advent Books were born.
the tradition
Each year I wrap all of our Christmas and holiday books and place them in a basket under the tree on December 1. Each night after dinner, the kids get to open a new book to be read at bedtime. It’s something they look forward to every day, and since we reuse the books year after year, I love the excitement that builds when they open a beloved book that we’ve read year after year. Each November, I spend an hour wrapping and labeling the books and hiding them until December 1 arrives. After Christmas, we pack up the books and they go away with all of our decorations.
where do you get the books?
It’s a tradition that doesn’t cost very much money, especially once you have the 25 books. I already had a small collection of holiday books from my old classroom, and then I went to TJ Maxx and added a bunch of inexpensive board books to my collection. You can get affordable Christmas books through Scholastic Book Clubs if you are a teacher or if you have school aged kids, and TJ Maxx and Home Goods have a ton of Christmas books each year. If you live near a used book store, that is another affordable way to build your collection.
You can check out all of my book recommendations that are in our collection here!
variations
Here are some different varieties of this tradition that you can try to make it personalized for your family!
who the books come from
The books can be from Santa, mom and dad or a mischievous elf! I personally prefer the books to be from mom and dad because so many of the books came from my classroom, so they have my name written in them 🙂 I also think it’s a bit more manageable when something comes from mom and dad. Less details to remember. I have considered our elf delivering a book a day or having the books arrive on the day the elf arrives, but again, that is a lot of detail to remember.
label and planting books
I label the wrapping paper with the book title (my kids are too young to read) and you could also number them and keep a list so you know which number is which book. It’s nice to know what all of the books are so you can plant the books on certain days if you want to. For example, I usually have them open certain books that coincide with other activities or special dates. i.e. The Night Before Christmas being opened on Christmas Eve, Gingerbread Mouse being opened the day we do gingerbread houses, The Polar Express on the night we watch that movie, and so on.
pacing yourself
As a mentioned above, there have been years when it was too hard for my kids to wait to open one book a day and I had to have one book under the tree per day. Otherwise, I would walk in the living room and find a bunch of unwrapped books and a very proud and happy toddler 🙂 You can do one book a day that appears under the tree, or have them all in a basket or central location so you can really see the countdown get smaller and smaller.
I will be sharing more of our favorite traditions over the next few weeks so stay tuned!
