Ideas For Creating Your Own Holiday Gift Calendar

The holidays are full of colorful lights, tasty comfort meals, sweet treats and family traditions. The sights, smells and feeling of the holidays are a great time to get together and work on a crafting project together.

Using what you have on hand, like a Bob Evans Farmhouse Feast box and a few gift cards, you can create a fun and personalized holiday activity everyone can enjoy.

DIY Advent Calendar

Growing up, we used Advent calendars to count down the days to Christmas, opening up little paper doors to reveal corny jokes or cute drawings. Nowadays, you can find calendars for kids and adults alike – and the doors now reveal chocolates, toys, fancy cheeses and more!

With a little more time at home this year, we’ve been getting extra creative and thought it would be fun to create our own Advent calendars. It’s a great activity for the family to work on together. You can add in notes along with presents that you either buy, collect or make.

For our Advent calendar, we ended up using jelly jars, but really any kind of small container will work. Reusable Tupperware, plastic or paper sandwich bags and gift boxes are all great options. If it fits, it sits (inside a Farmhouse Feast box). Whatever you use, be use to label it with the day of the month (1 through 24). We glued construction paper to our lids, but feel free to get creative here.

Designing your own Advent calendar means you get to tailor the prizes to the recipient. For little engineers, fill your calendar with building toys. Have a college kid in your life? Fill your calendar with Bob Evans gift cards for a taste of homestyle comfort when they aren’t at home. Parents and grandparents love photos and drawings or even a few corny jokes for extra nostalgia!

Feeling extra creative? Use one of these jelly jars to make your own snowglobe! Just glue an ornament or a souvenir to the lid, fill the jar with cold water, glitter or sequins and a few drops of glycerin, (you can get a bottle of vegetable glycerin at any drugstore), and screw your lid on tight! Instant slowglobe!

There is no limit to what kinds of prizes you can include in your holiday calendar. Have an artistic helper? Use a pad of tiny Post Its to create a holiday flipbook! Want a few minutes of peace and quiet for the next few weeks? Create a scavenger hunt for little adventurers – tricky clues will keep them occupied while you get a few extra minutes of online shopping.

Everyone loves getting some Bob Evans gift cards. (Hint hint – when you buy one for $50, you get a bonus card for $10 – just for you!)

Packing the daily prizes can be fun – especially if you’re planning on making homemade gifts. But, there’s the “calendar” itself! Once your jars or gift boxes are ready to go, take a few minutes to decorate the calendar itself. We kept our simple – we just glued some colorful trees to the top of our box and added a cozy red blanket to line our box, which can be used once all the presents have been opened.

The best part of the DIY advent calendar is that once the holidays are over, you can pack it up and use it again next year. Just be on the lookout for new corny jokes for next year’s calendar! Happy holidays!