Sometimes the holidays stress me out. Some years I don’t care about the mayhem and I pinterest my heart out coming up with fun activities and covering the house in glitter and ribbons and twinkle lights then other years I’m like, “What if we didn’t decorate for Christmas at all and we’ll just wait and see if Christmas happens anyway?”

I’m feeling somewhere in the middle this year but with Advent starting on Tuesday, the pressure is on to either get prepared or pretend we forgot Advent was a thing and see if the kids notice (they probably won’t, don’t worry). I have a beautiful advent calendar that my step mom made the kids a few years ago and I love putting it up but have a love / hate relationship with filling it. Coming up with 24 creative ways to say “Yay! Christmas!” can be exhausting or expensive or cavity filled.

This year I filled our advent calendar with those little stickers that come on the ends of the personalized name tags that charities send you around the holidays when looking for donations. You know, the guilt labels that you end up keeping whether you donate money or not because why would you throw perfectly good address labels away? And the stickers have been piling up for nine years now at least, so I had a pretty hefty collection of them.

I kind of wanted to an advent activity thing, too, and put in fun activities to do each day but that just stressed me out again because what if I don’t end up wanting to do that thing that day – or you know, life happens so I don’t want to put something particular on a certain day only to have that event canceled and the advent calendar turn into a liar because I forget to change it. I worry too much, it’s okay. Also I couldn’t come up with 24 activities. But I had ten activities that are totally repeatable and can mostly be done with minimum or no prep at all and that’s where this strange little idea of mine started.

To make the box: I grabbed an old tea tin that just ran out of tea that smells all amazing and cinnamony. Then I went to picmonkey.com, my graphic making / photo editing website of choice, and created this cute graphic. I knew my tin was 3 inches by 4 1/2 inches on each side so I went with those dimensions after googling pixel to inch conversions again. DPI continues to confuse me and my graphic is actually like twice as big as necessary, but that’s okay – I threw it in a word document, scaled the image size and then copied and pasted until there were four of them on one page and printed. I cut the graphics and wrapped them around my tin with some scotch tape to hold it all in place. Do I really need to tell you guys how to tape a piece of paper on a tin box? Probably not. Sorry.

To fill the tin: I decorated some popsicle sticks that I’ve had lying around my office as long as I’ve been a mother. I bought a box with like 1,000 popsicle sticks in it a million moons ago and I think I will have this box until the day I die. I took those charity address label stickers and stuck them on the tops of the sticks to look decorative and wrote activity ideas on the side of the stick. So fancy. (Pro tip: I filled the tin with gift bag tissue paper first because ten tiny popsicle sticks don’t really fill the tin and they looked sad. The tissue made the sticks kinda stand up and look more impressive.)

Here are our activities:

1. Watch a holiday movie.
2. Read a book together.
3. Dance party!
4. Family Game Night.
5. Make paper snowflakes.
6. Drink hot cocoa.
7. Sing Christmas Carols.
8. Family Compliment Day – tell every person in your family something you love about them. Enjoy all the feel goods.
9. Christmas Craft Time
10. Have a joke telling contest!

Feel free to steal my idea. I know it’s kind of amazing. What activities would you put on your popsicle sticks?