Easiest (& cheapest) Advent Calendar Ever!

So I've been searching on pintrest the past few weeks for an advent calendar to make. Well I took a bunch of ideas, combined them & then headed to Walmart. I ended up spending...gulp...about $70 on craft stuff. Granted not everything I bought was for this calendar, some of it was for Christmas/ anniversary gifts & some was reusable, i.e. corner rounder, etc, but it was all mostly craft stuff. I came home and got to work. About 2 days and 8 hours laters I decided that this calendar was ENTIRELY too much work to finish this year. I needed something much easier & quicker!

I'm sure I'm not the first person to think this up, but I'm proud to say I came up with the idea all on my own. So I went back to Walmart, this time only spending $2 and came out with my new advent calendar.

I bought two different packages of balloons, 15 count for $0.97 each at Walmart. I planned on using red & green, but they were out of green so I settled with gold instead. I cut out 25 pieces of paper and wrote things for our family to do on them. Then I folded up the slip of paper, put it in the balloon & then blew up the balloon. I used some sticky tack we had laying around and strung the balloons up with some yarn on one of the walls in our dining room.

So each morning we pop a ballon and then sometime during the day we do the activity on the slip of paper. The activities range from "color a Christmas picture"to "bake & decorate Christmas cookies" to "go Ice-skating". There are also some religious things on some of them "read a story/watch a movie about the birth of Christ", "read & act out Luke 2". I tried to coordinate some of activities to fit better with certain days, so some of our bigger activities that will take longer fall on Saturdays and simpler ones on a busy week night. Also we are going out of town for about a week so I didn't blow up those balloons, but plan to take them with us so we can still do them on our trip.

It took about 15 minutes or so to make & Jackson has loved popping the balloons so far. My only regret is not thinking of this advent calendar before I spent a small fortune on the other one, which I do plan to finish, just not today. =)