This year will be the second christmas brian and I are spending together, and we’re both getting so excited for the holiday season! Thanksgiving is over, the ground is covered with snow ice, and it’s almost an acceptable time to get a christmas tree. Last year, brian told me it was the first time he was really into the whole holiday cheer thing, so I did my best to make our apartment super festive. We picked out our tree at Big Star’s pop-up tree lot and walked it half a mile home, giggling and dropping it the whole way! We would’ve loved to cut one down in the woods and haul it home, but sometimes you gotta make the best of what you’ve got, so we embraced our city life!

This year I want to surprise him with a homemade advent calendar/garland, filled with lots of gifts and surprises. Pinterest has been a great source of inspiration for me for details like using canvas bags hanging on a garland instead of a traditional calendar. I really love this paper envelope version by Treasures and Travels.

I’ve been collecting some bigger gifts over the past few weeks to mix in with little candies and love notes. It took no time at all to sew up a bunch of little canvas bags to put all these goodies in, and I’ll mark them with the numbers once I get all the gifts together. I’m a pretty religious Amazon Prime shopper, so when I have to order from somewhere without free next day shipping, I get major anxiety about getting my stuff on time…

To hang the bags, I tied them to a fresh pine garland so we can use it as decoration in the apartment. I made some gift tags to use as markers for the gifts that are too big or hard to hang, and I’ll keep those in a basket on the floor.

We checked out the greens at Home Depot and were bummed at how expensive the fresh garlands were, and skimpy too. Lucky for me, Home Depot gives away their scraps from tree trimming for free! I grabbed a giant stack of super fresh clippings that I wired into a few wreaths and a garland. Totally worth the extra work to save $50!

  
I’m loving the finished product, hopefully it will turn out to be a really fun 25 days of Christmas!