Here it is November… what, the 26th already?

And you’ve got no Advent calendar to keep the little kiddies calm through the pre-Christmas countdown?

Marilyn Scott-Waters, The Toymaker, can bail you out with her free printable Advent calendar.

Just grab the two PDF files from Marilyn’s Christmas web page, and fire up the ol’ colour printer.

You’re going to print out one copy of each page. On the page with the Christmas tree picture, cut out three sides of each of the numbered doors.

The second page is glued on behind, with tiny seasonal pictures to be revealed as each door is opened day by day through December.

Easy-peasy!

For a last-minute Advent calendar, you can’t beat a quick (free) print job.

And the Toymaker’s design has real old-fashioned charm — like all of her paper toys — but all the speed and convenience that a busy modern parent could hope for.

Here’s another clever Advent calendar to make yourself, all thrifty and creative…

And I’m really liking this as a great way to re-use those styrofoam flats that are still widely used for protective packaging (like when you buy electronics gear), because many recycling programs won’t let you put them out in your recycling bin.

Anyway, this particular Advent calendar is the invention of a crafty Texas chick who goes by the name of burstandbloom on the Craftster forums. She’s thoughtfully provided a tutorial for making this advent calendar, with photographs of each step — but here’s the general idea:

1. Cut out 24 circles from a block of styrofoam — and see how nice B&B’s calendar looks, with an asymmetrical arrangement of different sized circles! That took a little advance planning, for sure!
2. Cover the raw edges of styrofoam with festive holiday paper, using a rough decoupage technique (glue it all down and shellac over it with Mod Podge or a similar clear protective goop), then embellish your calendar as you like.
3. Cover a piece of thin cardboard with pretty paper and glue it on the back.
4. Cut circles of cardboard large enough to cover the circle cut-outs in the styrofoam, and decorate them as you like, pinning each in place with a tab and a brad so they can be flipped up to reveal a tiny surprise inside.

You’re on your own for deciding what should go in each day’s hole in your Advent calendar, but I have faith that won’t be a big problem! You can’t go wrong with foil-wrapped chocolates…

B&B picked items that had special meaning for herself and her boyfriend — like a miniature cow, referring to an inside joke — or an object that signified a special holiday activity that she had planned for that day, like miniature cookie cutters for the day they’d bake Christmas cookies together or a tiny gift box for the day they’d be wrapping up gifts…

Looking for a quick way to make an Advent calendar, to count down the days to Christmas?

Here’s an idea —

Decorate up a 24-pocket shoe organizer — the fabric kind that’s made to hang on the back of a closet door is best — with iron-on fabric appliques, tinsel and glitter, Christmas scrapbooking stickers, festive red and green bows, or tiny Christmas ornaments.

Twenty-four pockets, get it?
One pocket in the Advent calendar for every day, from the first of December through to Christmas Eve.

A decorative number on each pocket will mark the days – Christmas stickers or holiday-theme scrapbooking stamps will do nicely for the numbers, if you’re not steady of hand for writing on the numbers with fabric paint or permanent marker; or fun sparkly iron-on numbers (rhinestones!) will do just fine, but i find the cost can add up unless you’ve had a chance to plan ahead and get them on sale.

Then, just slip a small surprise gift or treat into each pocket. Night by night, the young ones in the family (or your significant other?) can reach in and pick out the surprise package for that date. One nice idea is to hide special Christmas ornaments in the pockets, to pull out and add to the tree night by night. One family I know puts a different super-tasty bedtime snack into each Advent calendar pocket, like packets of flavoured hot chocolate drinks and single-serving cookies or sweets, things the kids don’t normally get for a bedtime snack outside the holiday season.

When the holidays are over, put the shoe organizer to work as a shoe organizer… or use the pockets to sort and tidy away all those small toys and craft supplies. Next year, just pull it out and decorate it up to serve as an Advent calendar again!

These child-sized elf dolls in cute country style are actually Advent calendars from Denmark. Count down to Christmas with tiny gifts hidden in the elves’ numbered pockets, and hang a holiday ornament on their metal rings for each day in December.

Boy Elf or Girl Elf styles, cotton fabric exterior with polyfil stuffing, are handsewn from Maileg of Denmark and available in limited quantities.

Where and how much? $88 now $69 each at Garnett Hill (updated design) or $95 $98 each for Calendar Elf/Pixie Boy and Calendar Elf/Pixie Girl designs at Fjorn Scandinavian.

There’s still just enough time to whip up an Advent calendar to (a) celebrate the period of Advent and/or (b) teach patience to the young’uns (or anyone else in the family who’s panting for Santa) in the countdown to Christmas.

Here, then, are three crafty ideas for Advent calendars that are fast and easy (and cheap!) to make yourself. These creative projects are also a great source of inspiration for dreaming up your own special style of Advent calendar to become a family tradition.

Matchbox Garland Advent Calendar

This brilliant idea came from ARTchix Studio‘s Lisa Cook and Denise Lombardozzi, who were inspired by Belinda Schneider to decorate 24 match boxes with nostalgic Victorian style images, then hang them from a swag of thick rick-rack.

You could also use a swag of braided rope, heavy velvet drapery cord with tassels on the ends, or an evergreen or tinsel garland — whatever best suits your own home’s decor.

Instead of matchboxes, you could use empty pill bottles — I usually keep them for storing seeds that I’ve harvested from my flower garden — or tiny boxes for party favors or any other kind of small container that you might have lying around. Then, of course, you hide a tiny gift or surprise in each container, for your family to open one each day of the Advent season.

Paper Chain Countdown to Christmas

When I was a rambunctious child blessed with a frugal and creative mother, we used to make a paper chain and hang it in the kitchen. What makes it an Advent Chain is that it’s made with twenty-four numbered links.

With great glee, every December morning before breakfast, my sister and I would tear off one of the links. The shorter the chain got, the closer we knew we were getting to Christmas. Now that I think about it, this was a particularly effective way for our mother to help us count down to Christmas before we were actually old enough to count!

Activity Village (UK) has printable templates you can use but we always just used of strips of giftwrap, coloured construction paper, comic pages from the weekend newspaper, or pages from the Christmas catalogue. Sometimes, I remember, we made the strips from plain typing paper and decorated them with crayons and stickers.

Family Activities Advent Calendar

One thing I really like about this next idea is that it encourages an amount of family togetherness.

Looblylu put together a box of “very rough and ready envelopes with an evening activity written on the inside of each one and sealed with an old yellowing sticker on which I wrote the date” — ingenious, this Family Activities Advent Calendar, and as quick-and-easy to put together as an Advent calendar can get!

So, maybe we don’t all have a supply of gorgeous origami paper on hand, like Loobylu did, but I’ll bet you can find plenty of gift wrap that would do just as well.

No special box to hold the envelopes? No problem. Wrap an empty tissue box in gift-wrapping paper, perhaps. Or what about jumbling the envelopes (without dates written on them) into a fancy bag or basket, and taking turns each evening to draw out one envelope at random?

The activities written inside the envelopes wouldn’t have to be a big deal or take a lot of effort or expense, but they should be something that kids would enjoy (and that adults can take part in without rolling their eyes and looking at their watches every three minutes). A lively round of a favorite game, played together as a family? An extra bedtime story? Or maybe just a small treat like relaxing an everyday household rule, for just tonight only — like, say, “Eat dessert first!”

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… :)

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 often quite tasteful holiday decorations for the home.

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 presented the Advent calendar as an upscale Gingerbread House with doors and windows that open to reveal any little treats you choose to hide within. How cool is that?

That particular Advent calender in the shape of a gingerbread house (sadly, no longer available) always reminded 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! One year she even made a real gingerbread house for us kids to decorate (and eat, later).

I also have a memory of my creative Mom, one Christmas season, helping us to make a big Santa Claus face out of construction paper. Then, every night before bed, we were allowed to glue one piece of popped popcarn onto a numbered space on Santa’s beard. As the numbers were covered up, and as the jolly old St. Nick grew a full white 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 my Mom’s popcorn.

For myself, I’d stick with the popcorn for Santa’s beard, because then you’d also have the fun of popping the corn, of stringing some onto a heavy thread for decorating the tree, and of eating all the extra! As a bonus, when we were finished with the Advent calendar and moving on towards the New Year, it could be disposed of in the compost instead of the trash.

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 online through Amnesty International, http://amnestyshop.org.uk.