As you know, we love us some books.
So I was immediately interested when I saw — on Pinterest, probably — an Advent tradition that used books instead of the traditional small toys or treats or candies.
Also, my parents bake enough cookies to feed 3.2 billion grandchildren and then they go to Florida for a month, sticking us with the leftovers. So we’re set on the sugar front is what I’m getting at.
One of the things that kept me from doing this in previous years was concern about cost — even if I got the books on sale, I figured I was looking at $10 each, and $240 is more than we’ll probably spend on all the kids’ Christmas gifts, let alone the Advent preamble. Enter Scholastic. I ordered through Seve’s class program and ended up getting 26 books for just under $40, or about $1.50 each. Now that was doable, especially given that the plan is to use these year after year.
The plan was to wrap them simply, in plain paper — I just used white tissue paper from the dollar store — and to number them, so that the kids get one new winter/Christmas-themed book every night leading up to December 24.
I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so I didn’t want to label each book by hand in case my penmanship was messy.
I’m cheap, so I didn’t want to run through tons of ink printing out all of the numbers in red and green.
Finally, I’m a dork, so of course I made a spreadsheet so I could figure how frequently I’d need to duplicate each number to complete a range from 1 through 24 (just zoom in for the details).
Then I cut those printed numbers out to serve as templates on construction paper:
Then I cut those out and glued them onto the wrapped books:
Then I stuck them in an empty box of cocoa because after all that wrapping and taping and cutting and gluing, Cocoa Box was as festive as I was going to get.
Cost: Affordable
Scale of Difficulty: Depends on whether or not you have to clean off table surface first
Paper Cut Potential: High
Return on (Two-Hour) Investment: TBD