Blogmas Day 4: Advent Calendars

Our advent calendar

My family has used many different advent calendars over the years, mostly of the paper variety. A few years ago we decided to make a homemade one in the style of the old advent calendars my great aunt Margaret made for various members of the family, with a green tree shape on which paper ornaments cut from Christmas cards and scraps could be taped. Aunt Margaret's advent calendars were made with a green felt tree, but I drew ours with crayon on paper and printed, cut, and glittered Victorian Christmas clip art for the ornaments.

Last year I noticed that the old drawing I had made was quite shamefully lacking in accuracy as regards shape and proportion--the fat branches all sloped downward, which is not how evergreen trees work--so in a rush on the night of November 30th I sketched a new tree and colored it with drawing ink, using photos of our past Christmas trees as a reference. I also added dots of snowflakes in watered-down blue ink and squiggles on the ground to represent snowdrifts, and went over all with white glitter glue.

I'm pretty pleased with the final result, especially given how quickly I completed the drawing and coloring. Each night we'll add another paper ornament to the calendar, until it's so full that there's not a space left--I'm always slightly surprised by how quickly the tree goes from sparsely adorned to well-decked!