Advent Calendar Day 1

This year, my elder daughter is away from home for Advent and Christmas and due to the pandemic, we may not be able to visit her for Christmas as planned. So in September I started planning a surprise Advent Calendar for her which would bring a little of her family home to her new abode in York (she is singing as a choral scholar at York Minster - at least we can see her when they live stream the sung services on YouTube). 

My girls shared a bought cloth Advent Calendar for much of their childhood, each day taking it in turns to take a character from the pocket and place it in the Nativity scene. 

We have just hung that Advent Calendar up ready for Mary to be placed in the scene.

I decided to make a new cloth Advent Calendar specially for my elder daughter and fill the pockets with gifts for her Christmas tree. I bought some Advent Calendar ribbon, some fabric and had fun designing and sewing the new cloth calendar.

The completed Advent Calendar, hanging on a wooden dowel in our home before it was posted to my elder daughter with instructions not to open the parcel until 1 December.

All the pockets filled with little numbered parcels (each gift was wrapped in brown paper). Three parcels were too large so I put numbered brown cards in those pockets instead and the related parcels were also labelled with the number.

Thanks to video call technology we had the fun of watching her open the large brown paper package (not tied up with string) on 1 December and hanging the Advent Calendar on a bar in front of the fireplace (not in use) in the house where she is staying.

The Advent Calendar with pockets filled, ready for opening the first parcel

Day 1 pocket

Day 1 parcel revealed the first of the Christmas tree decorations we had made for her.

Christmas Teddy cross stitch, stitched by my younger daughter and assembled by me

Christmas Teddy cross stitch, surrounded by tartan and poinsettia

Teddy with drum and trumpet on the back of the cross stitch teddy

She was delighted with this - she remembered the cross stitch kit (the girls had one each but she had never stitched hers, so it was returned to her complete for hanging on her Christmas tree while the other one will also be stitched to hang on our tree).