25 Days of Reading, a different kind of Advent Calender

I'm itching to start decorating the house for Christmas.  We are waiting until the 1st of December to get out the tree and all the other decoration goodies.  If my husband had it his way we would wait until Dec. 12th.  In his family they always waited until the 12 days before and kept up all the decorations until the 12 days after Christmas.  I think that is a lovely idea, but I am entirely too impatient to wait that long. 

Only one more day to wait!  But, today I got in a little Christmas spirit fix by making my daughter an advent calender in preparation for tomorrow.  I love advent calenders.  The buildup of something little each day is fantastic and brings out the kid in me.  This year I decided that I wanted to do something "different" for my 3 year old.  The last thing she needs is a big ol' hunk of chocolate covered sugar every day so I came up with this.

You see, I happened to stop at one of my favorite thift stores yesterday and they had a special on children's books.  I bought an entire bag {25 books} for $5.00.  Perfect!  So I took out the paper mache advent calender I had bought at Hobby Lobby and painted it with some craft paint and use the trusty Sharpie to write the numbers on the front.

Then I wrapped each book seperately and put a number tag on each one.

I made a second set of number tags to put inside each box of the advent calender.  Some boxes also have an extra treat like stickers, fancy erasers, etc.

So every night before my little Punky Brewester goes to bed she can go to her advent calender and open the box for that day and pull out a number tag.  Then she gets to find the wrapped "present" that has the matching number tag.

She gets to unwrap the book and we read that book together as her bedtime story.

I hope she likes this as much as I do!

Do you do advent calenders in your house?