Advent: Day One

And so it begins.  

I was hoping to have made an attractive advent calendar by the time this December swung around, but then I was also hoping to have lost ten kilos and cleaned out the car and they didn't happen either, so whatevs.  We're still using the recycled tacky red tree calendar from last year.

Once again I am filling each drawer with a Christmas activity (you can read about all our past advent activities here).  This year I do have a little something up my sleeve for  those days when I'm too fried to come up with an activity - more on this tomorrow.

Todays activity was 'write a letter to santa'.  Minty took this quite literally and wrote the letters A, H and T on her page.  When I asked Turi if he was going to come and write his letter, Minty leant over and wrote a T in the middle of his page, and then said, 'It's OK mum I've written his letter for him'.  

After a bit more prompting about what she might like to ask Santa for, Minty drew a large brown scribble.  When I asked her what it was she told me it was 'ice' because for Christmas she would like to go ice-skating.  Her only other request was that she could visit her cousin Lily for Christmas.  Turi didn't seem to grasp the concept of what we were doing and just glued a bunch of artificial leaves and glitter to his page.  Not sure if I can garner any gift suggestions from this?

Since we were all at a bit of a loose end while we waited for Turi's excessively glued creation to dry, I came up with a last minute Christmas craft activity.  We made little Santas out of old toilet rolls.  Minty's effort is on the left, mine is on the right.  Turi's effort looks a bit more like a biblical figure than santa since he eschewed the red paper clothes in favour of an extra long beard and more gold glitter.  Turi likes glitter.