Advent Calendar Bags

Each Christmas I make the kids an Advent calendar.  Last year I made a toilet paper roll Advent calendar that was alot of fun to make and enjoy.

This year I found these bags at Dollar Tree and knew they would make a great Advent calendar.

The bags came 12 to a pack and since we countdown all 24 days I needed 2 sets. Some folks might countdown just 12 days and in that case only 1 set needed.  What a fun and frugal way to countdown to Christmas!

Other than filling the bags, the only other thing I needed was some way to number the bags.  I had a roll of labels sitting around our craft cabinet for years and finally was able to put them to use with this project.

Supplies needed:

Dollar Tree Christmas bags
White labels (or number stickers)
Black Permanent marker

The last part and the part I enjoy most is filling the bags.  Some bags contain notes about things we can do on the particular day.  Some of my notes include baking, watching a Christmas movie and driving around to look at Christmas lights.  Other bags contain dollar store trinkets like a jingle bell necklace, card games, Christmas socks and I even stuck a couple of dollars in one and some candy in others.  There are so many great ideas to fill your bags with!

As far as displaying our bags at first I was going to use some red buckets from the dollar store but the buckets were not quite big enough.  I decided to try and use what else I already had on hand so I cut a piece of baking twine and used clothespins to hang our bags along our staircase. I will do this same thing to the other side of our staircase counting down all 24 days.

That's it! This was so easy, frugal and practical.  This project cost a whopping $2 (not counting the trinkets but you could just do all notes which costs nothing and offers the most fun!)