Fa La La

Are you feeling the Holiday Spirit yet? I am already in Christmas mode because you see, I travel to Kentucky in the middle of December so I don't have as much time as most to get gifts ready for family and especially to prepare my advent calendar: Random Acts of Christmas Kindness. I talked about it last year in a post here. 

Would you like to keep Christmas centered more on Christ and living your month of December full of service like He did daily? If so, here are several ways you could create an advent calendar based around service. 


What I did was create tags and then we would hang them on the tree once the service was completed. I loved it because at the end of the season our tree was filled with "service." I put the date and the service to be performed on one side of the tag and then on the other side, a scripture about Christ and/or service that we would read in the morning when Keshlyn pulled out the tag for the day. It was like a quick little devotional.

Sorry for the cruddy pictures, but this is just to give you an idea of what I did. My tags were assorted green, red, and cream. Thank you Cricut for making cutting tags so fast and easy! A punch would work great too.

These tags are laminated so that I can use them year after year but the side with the service is taped on. This is so I can take it off and redo the services each year. I look forward to some new ones!




On to the calendar ideas...These links are not to "service calendars" but they're cute ways you could display a calendar with cards, tags, or slips of paper that list a service/Random Act of Christmas Kindness to be done that day. 

option 1.
Socks. This is the one I want to do...easy and cute. I am hoping to find enough before the first of December so that I can use this calendar.
http://www.marthastewart.com/270492/baby-sock-advent-calendar?czone=holiday/workshop-christmas/quick-and-easy-ideas&center=307034&gallery=856465&slide=170672

option 2.
This is the one I made last year because I was too crunched for time to go out and search for the socks...however this took much more time that I though it would due to all of the detailed scrapbooking. It requires a lot of scrapbooking embellishments/paper and may not be the best choice if you don't already have it on hand like I did or if you're looking for something quick and simple.
http://kimberlypetersen.typepad.com/photos/things_i_made/advent.html

option 3.
If you don't care what days you do what service...you could totally just do something cute and simple like this one. Make up all your service cards or tags (whatever you want to do) and put them in a glass jar to pull one each day until Christmas. I can't do something like this because I choose services on certain days for a reason (i.e. one that takes more time on the weekend, ones that I can do while in Kentucky, etc...) When you click on this link, you'll have to scroll down just a bit to see the jar display idea.
http://kindertastic.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2011-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=39

option 4.
This one is super cute and simple. Brown paper bags made cute with a little ribbon and cutesie numbers. (Psst. the numbers are printable from the site! So all you would have to do is get cardstock, make sure you have colored ink, and print them all out and attach to to the paper bag.)
http://bethproudfoot.blogspot.com/2010/11/countdown-to-christmas.html

option 5.
Another cute paper bag calendar idea. Read through this link because this is actually the site that helped me develop the whole thing last year. She actually provides a printable as well that I used. It is a card that you leave with your service or give to the person you're doing the random kindness for. It's really cute. You'll see what I mean.
http://tsjphotography.com/blog/random-acts-of-christmas-kindness-summary/