{12 days of Christmas.}

I love Christmas and all the season brings.  Well, almost all of it.  Between holiday preparations, seasonal activities and crafts, school and work parties, shopping for gifts, plus all the normal stuff of life, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.  Has it happened to you, too?  It’s okay, you can be honest.  When it happens to me I begin to lose site of what Christmas is all about, but I’m determined to change that this year.

I started by creating a simple and printable Advent Countdown Chain.  Each day the kids pull off a chain to reveal the portion of the Advent story we’ll read that day.  Next I created a kit to celebrate the 12 days of Christmas, which is where the activities come in.  Each day the kids will open an envelope and inside find the activity we are going to do that day.  Some of them will also include a little gift to go along with the activity.

Here are some of the things we’ll be doing —
* Visiting Santa
* Baking treats (with new aprons)
* Fancy hot cocoa night
* Watching a Christmas movie under a fort
* Chinese take out (with new kids chopsticks)
* Riding the train downtown to see the holiday decorations
* Watching it snow (an event at our local outdoor mall)

Between counting down the days till the birth of Jesus through our Advent Chain and being intentional with our time through this simple 12 Days of Christmas Kit, our holiday season already feels more merry and bright!

I thought you might like to make one for your family too, so I made the 12 Days of Christmas Kit as a free printable you can download.  The kit includes the numbers for each envelope and 12 notecards.  Just add your activities to each card and tuck them into envelopes or craft bags.

Merry Christmas friends!

Heather Hamilton is our Inspiration contributor. She’s the wife to one and the momma to three; two that live in her house and one that lives in God’s. You can find her sharing her journey to becoming the girl God created her to be over at her blog, Life Made Lovely, and sharing her love of handmade in her new shop, The Paperie.

She’s the founder of the Joyful Life Library and is the curator of The Joyful Shop, which uses 100% of it’s profits to support the library project. She’s also the Creative Director for Beautifully Rooted, a site for creative Christian women. And every day, she chooses joy.