Advent Calendar

I was up late making an advent calendar for the girls.

Waaaaaay late...

When I was growing up we had a felt one that had pockets with little ornaments that you stick on a tree each day, pretty similar to this:

 I have no idea where that advent calendar went and I have no time to make a felt one of my own at the moment so I decided to wing it and make a "temporary" (I say "temporary" only because I really liked the way ours turned out and may actually end up keeping it) one for this year until I can find a felt one I like or get the one that I used as a kid.
I found a few ideas that I liked online (mainly this one) but none of them were really doing it for me so I just came up with a crazy creation of my own.
I REALLY liked the idea Pink and Green Mama did with making a list of activities to do together and put them in the envelopes for each day. I didn't want to do envelopes though so I thought it would be cool to do a puzzle piece a day and write the activity on the back of the piece and at the end we'll have a completed puzzle to play with over and over again.
That idea got flushed down the toilet and I decided to use craft sticks to write the activities on and had to end up using envelopes to hold the craft sticks.
Anywho, here is what I came up with, BTW, it's not very Christmas themed, even the activities aren't really about Christmas, just doing things together that we don't normally do very often...

 These are just envelopes I had laying around, I cut off the flaps and taped them to posterboard.

The desk started off semi-neatly...

Here's the puzzle I chose, it's about 10x13.

 I put the puzzle together before hand and numbered the pieces just so that each new piece will fit to a previous piece.

By the end of the night my desk was trashed!

Here's the finished product, hung up in the kitchen. The puzzle pieces are all in their place and the activities are all written on the back of the craft sticks.

We are also doing 25 days of books which I saw here, we aren't doing christmas themed books though, I couldn't imagine getting 25 christmas themed books every year....I'm  also not going to wrap them, I think a small bow on the book laying on the bed at bedtime might be a fun surprise :)

Edit:
Check out all these cool advent ideas as well!