There’s only one sure way to stop the little ones from pestering with “How many more sleeps to Christmas? How many more sleeps to Christmas?” … and that is to put up an Advent calendar. Let the little darlings count down the days for themselves! Besides, it’s a rather nice tradition.
As I recall the Decembers of my own childhood, our usual Advent calendar was a cheap cardboard construction with little doors that we popped open, one a day, to reveal a seasonal picture. Perhaps this is showing my age, but I recall being quite excited about the whole thing…
Advent in the Christian sense refers to the four weeks before Christmas. The four Sundays of advent are often traditionally celebrated with four candles, often on an Advent wreath, with one to be lit each Sunday…
A fifth, white or gold, candle — called a “Christ Candle” — is often lit in the center on Christmas Day or used to replace the wreath altogether.
In popular usage, Advent is the month of December up to Christmas Day. A common way of marking the days of this advent, particularly among children who believe in Santa Claus, is an Advent Calendar. These can carry religious messages, seasonal pictures or little chocolate shapes…
— Wikipedia
These days, kids expect their Advent calendars to be more, er, rewarding than that — there’s supposed to be a treat for each day. And the cardboard calendar has evolved into much more interesting forms, doubling as holiday decorations.
A natural progression is the Advent calendar as wall hanging.
Tree and wreath shapes are popular, and easy to create with simple shapes of felt.
Or you might like to sew up a quick Advent calendar quilt with a free pattern from Kameleon Quilts, featuring tiny stockings to hold a daily surprise.
With a bow to some of our best-loved holiday food traditions, Sur La Table presents the Advent calendar as an upscale Gingerbread House with doors and windows that open to reveal any little treats you choose to hide within.
This gingerbread house reminds me of the pre-Christmas baking flurry when I was little, coming home from school to wonderful smells and dipping my fingers into the cookie-dough bowl when Mother’s back was turned!
I also have a memory of my mother helping us to make a big Santa Claus face out of construction paper, one year. Every night before bed, we kids were allowed to glue one piece of popped popcarn onto a numbered space on Santa’s beard. As the numbers were covered, and the jolly old elf grew a full popcorn beard, we knew we were getting closer to Christmas.
There’s a free pattern for a similar paper Santa calendar at Families Online Magazine, if you don’t feel up to free-hand drawing the face. The only real difference is that the directions call for the use of “cotton balls” (cosmetic puffs) for the count-down beard instead of Mom’s popcorn.
(For myself, I’d stick with the popcorn because then you’d also have the fun of popping it, of stringing some onto a heavy thread for decorating the tree, and get a healthy bedtime snack out of it. 
And the calendar could be put in the compost instead of the trash, when we were done with it.)
But if chocolate’s your pleasure, why not mark the true meaning of the season with fair trade chocolate, and help out some less fortunate people in developing countries while you count down to Christmas. A beautiful blue Advent calendar by Divine Chocolate, for example, is available through Amnesty International.
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