How to Make a Book Advent Calendar

It’s one month to Christmas Eve and my mind has been turning to advent calendars. I always seem to end up panic organising these at the very end of November (or worse yet, buying small advent calendar fillers a day or two ahead throughout December, one step ahead of the sher-elf) so this year I decided that I would be organised and make sure that I had things ready in advance.

Behold, my book advent calendar.

Now I know that this might look a little excessive, but advent calendars have become big business in recent years, so I’ll sometimes buy a beer or beauty advent calendar as a gift for a relative who is very into a particular hobby, so I thought, why not a book advent calendar? While I’m sure that you can buy a book advent calendar, making your own book advent calendar allows you to tailor it to the recipient’s genre preference, for example, a crime fiction advent calendar, young adult fiction advent calendar or romantic fiction advent calendar… the ideas are endless while buying the books second-hand saves a lot of money while making it a gift for your friend and giving a nod to worthy charities at Christmas.

For my advent calendar, I scoured a local charity shops to find recent fiction paperbacks and on average these cost me 50p each, so you can easily buy the books for under £15 if you hunt around for bargains. The brown paper was inexpensive, and you could use string instead of ribbon, or do as I did and buy a large roll of cheap organza ribbon that can be used for the rest of your Christmas wrapping.

You will need:

24 books, wrapping paper, ribbon or string, coloured markers, decorations.

How to make it:

1. Wrap the books (tip, pre-cutting the paper makes this faster)
2. When the books are wrapped, try out different stacking formations until you are happy with your design.
3. Once you’re happy with your final design, number the books with a coloured marker so that you can remember their final position in the stack.
4. Once the books are numbered, take the stack apart and decorate them with any string, ribbon or embellishments that you want to add.
5. Restack the books.
6. Go wild with the Christmas decorations, have a cookie and a cup of tea.

NB. This is to make a 24 book advent calendar but you could easily customize this for a different time period, or do the twelve days of Christmas instead.