A Christmas Photo Garland

Every year, people use advent calendars filled with chocolate and small gifts to brighten up the days before Christmas. You can create your own individualised advent calendar by combining a self-made garland and your own photos to increase the pleasant anticipation of the coming of Christmas one day at a time.

The photo advent calendar is perfect for those of you who are looking for a new alternative to the classic chocolate advent calendar this year. You can really spruce up your personalised advent calendar by adding photos of family members, impressive landscapes, and other Christmas motifs. For this, you’ll only need to follow a few steps and in no time at all you’ll have a one-of-a-kind advent garland that you and the rest of your family will be sure to enjoy.

• First, you’ll need to craft a garland as the basis for your calendar. For this, you’ll need 24 small gift pouches. You can even make these yourself by sewing together some fabric. You could search for some fabric with Christmassy motifs and colours. Afterwards, wrap a ribbon around the upper portion of the gift pouch that you can use to close up the pouch after filling it with sweets or a small gift and affix it to a long string. You could alternatively use napkins to serve as gift pouches. Simply place the small treats in the middle of the napkin and bind the corners together with a ribbon. You can then affix your makeshift gift pouch to the garland string. Another option is to buy pre-made gift pouches. Depending on your own personal tastes you can also spruce up your garland with some extra decorative elements. Let your creativity run wild!
• Before closing up the pouches, fill them up with 24 different surprises. You could, for instance, fill the pouches with little gift vouchers or small messages to bring a smile to your loved ones’ faces. Other ideas could be personal care products, bath supplements, pocket warmers, various kinds of tea, paperbacks, etc. You can of course vary the calendar’s contents according to the predilections of the person receiving the advent calendar. If the calendar is for a child, small toys are perfect. In addition, you can add some sweets or homemade Christmas cookies.
• Choose some winter photos from past Christmas celebrations out of your picture collection and have these developed in a desired format. Photos of your children or family pet are particularly nice to look at. Getting your photos developed in a format of 9cm works best since anything bigger could completely cover up the pouches. Depending on the size of your own gift pouches, of course, you can use whatever size might meet your own individual needs. Click here to order digital prints of your photos.
• Once you’ve received your photos, you’re all ready to get started designing the advent calendar. Cut out 24 small numbers out of cardboard to use for each day and affix these to the photos. Alternatively, you could also edit the photos on your computer before printing them out so that they all feature numbers. You can then use wooden clothespins to attach the photos to the gift pouches. Now, each day of your advent calendar features a personal memory from your life.

Should you not want to decorate all of your gift pouches with photos, you could also design your advent garland another way. Instead of filling all of the pouches, you could simply create gift vouchers from your developed photos, such as a voucher for baking cookies together. If going with this variant, it’d be best to use photos that give the recipient some kind of hint as to what the gift voucher is good for. For this alternative, you could also edit your photos with text on the front side before developing them or you could simply write on the reverse side of the photo after printing them. Lastly, attach the photos to the garland with wooden clothespins and your individually designed advent calendar is all finished!