Start your own advent calendar tradition…it’s not too late for this year. Heck, most of the time, I don’t get mine put up until a week of December has already elapsed–makes tying on the village pieces go faster!

Here are links to just some of the cute ones that I found on the web if you need inspiration for this year or next:

• From Angry Chicken
  • From Allsorts
  • From My Little Bookcase

To the left is my calendar with nothing tied to the date loops as of yet. It’s one my mother cross-stitched for me back in the day. You can get similar kits at the same Solvang, California needlecraft shop where she got this one. I have a tiny wooden village from what was then West Germany each piece of which gets tied to one of the day’s loops. Well, sometimes they get tied to the loops–some years that’s too much trouble and we just grab one piece out of the storage bag each day. There are houses (both blue- and red-roofed), bridges/walls, trees, cows, people (who are gigantically out of scale), and a church. It’s still fun to watch the village grow as we near Christmas, one piece each day.

Some of the village including strangely enormous zombie-like man.