the first year that mr. happy stuff and i were married, i sewed 24 of these little felt mini-stockings and we each filled 12 for the other person to celebrate the 12 days of christmas. we carried on the tradition for about 3 years before it fell by the wayside amidst the hustle and bustle of visiting family over the holidays. this year, i got them out to do an advent calendar for the happy baby. i thought a long time about what i wanted to put in the stockings. not bad chocolate. not plastic trinkets. needed to be small enough to fit…. in the end, i decided on a mix of three different ideas. the first idea is that i wanted a way to use the advent calendar to talk about the nativity story, so i looked for a 25-piece nativity scene small enough to fit in the stockings and kid-friendly enough that he could play with the pieces if he wanted to. most of the ready-made ones were pretty pricey or pretty ugly or too much of a choking hazard. i was attracted to the idea of felt finger puppets for each character, but thought that sounded like way too much work in a busy season. then i found this free downloadable version. the artwork is super cute, but tp tubes are too big to fit in these stockings (and i don’t have 13 lying around). so, i’ve been altering the art one piece at a time (sometimes just shrinking it, sometimes also drawing the “back” side so that they look like this:
the original artist would not give me permission to publish the art in the altered form, but if you’re interested, leave a comment and maybe i can e-mail you a copy when i’m all done? so… each day we open a stocking and it has a new piece to add to the nativity scene and sometimes a bible verse to go along with the characters we’re adding that day. on some days, there’s also a slip of paper with an activity (inspired by Elsie marley’s list) or a note to “read a christmas book” inspired by the popular blog idea i first read about here, but have now seen all over the place. i’ll write more tomorrow about my own spin on the christmas book tradition. i gotta go change someone’s stinky pants.
an awesome advent idea! the girls both love the fisher price nativity set that i got for C for her first or second christmas. i got them the large three piece set and it sits on our fireplace hearth for them to arrange and rearrange to their hearts content. now that C is learning more about the true meaning of christmas through preschool, it’s awesome to see her really understand each piece. :)
btw – we miss you! hope to see you at storytime soon!
Oh my gosh I made 24 stockings for my husband as an Advent calendar, too! Ours are knit and I always end up filling them with lame stuff at the last minute because I forget about it. But I have an idea for next year– I’m going to keep 24 pieces of paper in our nightstand, and when we have a memorable day or fun experience we want to remember, I’m going to write it down on one of the 24 pieces of paper… then in December, I’ll put one piece in each stocking, and we can read about our fun memories from the year all month long.