Christmas Advent Calendars - Part Four

This is the last one I'll post - I promise. If you don't have the same love of advent calendars as I do, I'm sure the last several posts have been very boring for you!

This one is a Craft Advent Calendar.

In previous years, I've done one where you have a Santa face and on each day leading up to Christmas you glue another cotton ball onto his beard, and one where you make a simple ornament each day to hang on the tree. Both were fun and worth trying.

But this year I saw this idea on Pinterest, and thought it was great. She had made a small Santa face with the numbers 1-24 on his beard, and on each day you got to snip a bit of his beard away.

I kept the same concept, but changed the design a little.

I changed my Santa face from being very geometric (triangle hat, rosy circles on his cheeks, and a round red nose) to being a bit softer. Also, instead of having the #1 at the bottom and having the children snip the numbers according to the date, I had #24 at the bottom, and then it acts as a count-down where they know exactly how many days are left until Christmas by just reading the last number, rather than figuring out the math. And finally, instead of making a smallish one for each of my kids, I opted to make one large one to hang on a door in our home. It is big. The fill length of a sheet of poster board. Then it doubles as a decoration, you see.

Here is a close up of his face. Pretty cute, eh? I'm not an artist by any means, but I was happy with how this guy turned out. My plan is to have the kids snip away at the number strips this December, and then when Christmas is over, I'll take the face part in to be laminated, and next year I'll just make a new beard and attach it to the base with some sticky Velcro dots and we can do this over and over.