The One With 72 Gifts

As mentioned during our ‘Where Did November Go?’ post, Brad and I spent a lot of our time in November working on a "secret Santa" project. Usually I’m not one to start thinking about Christmas before Thanksgiving (and certainly not one to decorate before the "giving thanks" holiday is over), but Brad and I decided to make advent calendars as gifts for some of our family members this year, so we obviously had to finish these before the first of December. I originally thought it would be great to get a couple of gifts/people crossed off our list so early in the season, but after wrapping 72 gifts before Thanksgiving Day, I’m not too eager to pick up another piece of ribbon for awhile.

See our 3 advent calendars? They’re old soda bottle crates with 24 dividers. 3 x 24 = 72 = lots of wrapping.

To be honest, I’m really excited how they turned out. I love the old wooden crates and it was fun to come up with little gift ideas for each person for 24 days. I even got a little too carried away with my gift ideas that I didn’t take into consideration how small those bottle slots would be. So Brad came up with the brilliant idea of making cones to stick out of the crate and hold whichever oversized gifts I purchased. (Love that guy!)

Bonus: Found a Rochester, NY crate just for my mom!

Now I'm kind of wishing I made one for myself. ;)