Make an advent calendar (#35)

• Posted on KK
• in 100 things
• on March 21, 2011
• 5 Comments.

I’m honestly not sure why I wanted an advent calendar so badly – bad enough that it ended up on my list. I say it’s because I wasn’t allowed to have one when I was a kid, which I don’t think is true. I’m sure if I had really put my heart into getting one, my mom would have gotten one from the grocery store – $3 well spent for little pieces of chocolate behind tiny cardboard doors. Truly, my real motivation was wanting to create new family traditions – things that Dan and I do around the holidays, or whenever.

Originally, I didn’t think I would be making an advent calendar. (Right. If you don’t know what an advent calendar is, click the link to learn) I thought I would just be buying one that I like. Except…a lot of advent calendars out there to buy are made in a style I would not display in my house. I did a LOT of searching. They seem to fall into a few main categories: very religious (which makes sense, advent is a religious season), a country/rustic feel, and then cheap disposable.  Even Etsy let me down, while I definitely found more crafty/creative options (sort of like these) I didn’t find a good fit for us.

Let me also just say that all this searching/looking around/almost giving up and buying whatever cheap calendar was on sale at Target stretched out over probably a two year period. Dan was…not amused.  In my own defense, in addition to this being a new tradition that we started, I wanted us to have something that would last a long time. I didn’t want to buy something that would fall apart, or that I would pull out of storage next December and not like anymore.

Happily, I found this. Yes please. Functional, attractive, versatile. After I found this, it made the idea of buying something even more difficult, basically because I couldn’t buy this anywhere. So, at some point I decided that we were going to have to make one. And then, I put it on my list of things to do, so I HAD to make one.

Last year, around Halloween, I decided that I should, you know, start.  I knew I didn’t want the calendar to be green and red, like the one in the example photo. Because Dan and I celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas, I wanted it to be something that we could have out during December that would blend in with the other holiday decorations that I insist we hang up every year. So, red and blue. (Not in an obnoxious Fourth of July kind of way)

Dan and I are sitting here discussing it as I type, and we aren’t sure when this next  decision was made, but at some point we decided to move from painting 25 boxes to covering 25 boxes with paper – which of course, would be decorated in various patterns within the defined color scheme. Maybe it’s a moment we blocked out, because WOW did this increase the time and labor intensity of this project…but we didn’t realize that until later.  Over our Thanksgiving trip to Nashville, we went out and bought 25 boxes of different shapes and sizes, and pretty papers. I learned two things on this venture. One, your friendly neighborhood Michaels store is probably open on Thanksgiving day, which I did not expect. Two, Dan cares quite a bit more than I anticipated about color schemes/matching patterns/etc.

We made templates for each size of box in Nashville  and laid out what we wanted the calendar pattern to look like.

Not pictured: All the cracks from Dan’s family about our general hippy craftiness

And then…the level of work we had gotten ourselves into became clear. On the plane ride back to SF, we traced the templates onto the pretty paper, while ignoring the strange looks from the guy sitting next to us.  We cut out the templates and then began gluing the paper onto the box tops while we caught up on pretty much every TV show we have ever even kind of liked.  I am not exaggerating when I say that the cutting, folding, gluing and re-gluing took us an ENTIRE DAY. As in, all the daylight hours.

About 2 hours in, this conversation took place:

Dan: You wanted to do this to the tops and bottoms of the boxes?

Kristin: Well,of course, they have to ma-

Dan: No.

Cute.

After the box tops were covered, I painted the numbers on in white, and once they dried, outlined them in silver. Then, we put it up on display, and agreed not to talk about it for a long time. We’re just now getting over the trauma.

The good news is, I absolutely love it.

As we were finishing up, this conversation took place:

Dan: You know, we could make and sell these on Etsy.

Kristin: Dan, we figured out that between the two of us, it took 24 HOURS to make this. I’m not spending that kind of time on someone else’s advent calendar.

Dan: We would get better at it, and it would go fa-

Kristin: No.