An Advent Calendar for Orthodox Christians

I first saw this adorable project here. So I clicked over here for all the details. I just love crafty bloggers :) So cute I just had to try it!!! What I really love is that this project wasn't locked into the typical 25 numbers found on every advent calendar on the market. With an extra 15 buckets, I could create an advent calendar with the 40 numbers needed for an Orthodox Christian advent.

I wanted something super easy so instead of drilling holes, I decided I would look for a peg board. After a trip to the local chain lumber yard, I had this...

A can of green spray paint later...

After it dried we brought it inside to continue with the project...

I went to the dollar store and sure enough...look what I found...

While I was at the dollar store, I looked for stickers that I could use to number the buckets. Sure enough, they had alphabet and number stickers...in RED. I bought several packages and then each bucket received a number...

Now here is where I deviated from the original in a big way. See this advent calendar also serves as our Jesse Tree. By searching the internet for FREE clip art images, I was able to find most objects suggested by this group. I printed the small images and then used M*d P*dge to affix the image to the correctly numbered bucket...

And the buckets ended up looking like this...

Using pegboard hooks I purchased at a local hardware store, I arranged them in the shape of a tree and hung the buckets in order.

Ta-Da!!!

So, here is how we use our advent calendar/Jesse tree. At the beginning of the season, all buckets have the numbers facing out. Each day, we read the reading of the day and one of the children turns the bucket over to reveal the image for the day. For each day, the children are to do something nice for someone else (but they cannot tell the person "this is my nice thing I'm doing for the day"). They then write down what they have done on a slip of a paper and place it in the bucket for that day. On Christmas day we will gather all the strips of paper as our gift to Jesus Christ for His birthday.

Now, just so you'll know this was a fairly inexpensive project even with my changes. The pegboard cost about $1.75. A can of spray paint $3.50 and the hooks were $0.16 each, which came to about $6.40. 4 packages of stickers for $4.00 and 14 packages of buckets for $14.00.

Fun crafty project from a minimally crafty mom.

May God bless you abundantly this Christmas season!

theresesophia