Christmas time without an Advent calender is impossible – I always had one as a child {sometimes even two} and I love to make the days a bit more special before Santa Claus finally comes!

And making one myself is really fun – specially choosing and finding little gifts to put inside.
This year I made two, one for the girl, one for the boy and the baby gets a big kiss every day on top instead :)

This year I went for the environment friendly version and used old cardboard boxes to build 2 Christmas houses to keep all the tiny packages.
Lots of masking tape {seriously what would one day without masking tape nowadays} and a few late night sessions to put everything together.
Never thought wrapping up 48 little gifts can take that much time…


On the back of each present I wrote a little letter to remember for whom they are.

Amongst all the red, white and brown I put some pink for the lil mis and robots for the mister. Can you resist pretty wrapping paper?


On Friday evening I put everything together, arranged the presents and…. tada….
Saturday morning the kids came down…. BIG EYES MOMENT…. and searching for number one…

Below a few pictures from the “making of” and like I said, I was preparing during the evenings and the pictures are not super nice… but still…

First I collected boxes and put them together to see how it will look like. This year I was really early with the presents for the calender {see my finds here}, so one evening I was sitting on the sofa – wrapping!

Last thing was to build the houses and fill them…

What do you think?

{see here what the kids found in the calender on Saturday}