Cardboard Roll Advent Calendar

I love counting down to Christmas, and now I have children it makes it even more exciting. I am not so keen on chocolate filled calendars since it really doesn't have all that much to do with the  meaning of Christmas - not that I need an excuse to make our own advent calendar. 

We cut 24 cardboard rolls to the same size and painted them green. Then we set them out in the shape of a Christmas tree and glued them together. I found that we needed to hold them together with pegs until the glue dried. When the glue was completely set we removed the pegs and glued the cardboard tree to a big piece of stiff card. The children used stencils to paint the word 'Advent' onto the cardboard backing. On standing back to admire our tree, we were dismayed to realise that the tree looked maroon, not green. We poked green tissue paper into each little hole and solved that problem.

Now the hard part is done, all that is left is to work out what we are going to put in each hole. I think we will write a nice thing we can do for someone else for each day and put it in the little holes.