Add an Advent Calendar to your Bullet Journal!

Christmas is always a fun time of year, filled with festive cheer and happy people! I am always astounded and how much STUFF goes on sale at christmas time and how overwhelming it can feel to be part of the mayhem that is Christmas!

If you want to see any other Seasonal spreads, themes or layouts check out our December post.

To even out how I feel about it, I decided to take on board, doing something fun and creative in my bullet journal to really celebrate the festive season, and focus on my own self care.

History of the Advent Calendar

For those of us that are not to aware of what the meaning behind advent is; Advent is the four-week period beginning on the Sunday nearest the feast day of St. Andrew the Apostle (November 30) through the following three Sundays.

Historians estimate that Advent, which derives from the Latin word for coming, has been celebrated since the 4th century. Originally, the period was a time for converts to Christianity to prepare for baptism, but it’s now more commonly associated with the anticipation of the anniversary of Christ’s birth on December 25.

Not to dissimilar from the styles we have instore today, the early styles included the Adventclock or the Adventcandle – a candle for each of the 24 days until Christmas. So in religious families little pictures were hung up on the wall – one for each day in December. An other tradition was to paint chalk strokes on the door, one per day until Christmas Eve.Now wouldn’t that be easy to pop into your blackout journal?

Apparently the first candy/chocolate advent calendar was seen in 1908, when a crafty mum popped 24 little candies behind each window, for her son! #craftymumsarethebest!

Since then the Advent calendar takes all sort of shapes and forms, from amazing gifts for every one of the 24 days and

Ok! So how can we make our Bullet Journal more fun leading up to christmas? I thought of fun ways to incorporate both the fun of creating something and the fun of advent calendars into something we already use!

Now if you would like to see more info on this amazing foil-quill pen…head over to this post!

24 days of Self Care in your Bullet journal advent calendar

Self care is becoming more and more commonplace these days and what better way to start practicing self care than through 24 days of prompts! There are a ton of things you could pop in there – and we have 24 cute printable suggestions here – you can download them for free!

Keeping them simple like “taking a walk” means you aren’t bound to achieve tricky self care tasks – like “take a bath” when you might not have a tub wouldn’t work, so make sure they are practical and easy to do – but try to do one everyday!

You can down load the gratitude printable here!

24 days of affirmations in little envelopes for your advert calendar

There are a couple of things you could do with these, and affirmations are just one suggestion. You could also pop 5-10$ in each envelope over the 24 days if you can, and by the end of 24 days (lets say you put in 1$) you will have 24$ to spend on something you might have had on your wishlist! How awesome would that be!

Using it for affirmations or supportive notes to yourself would just be such a special way to start the festive season with less stress right? Opening up day 16 and seeing that you are worrying about unimportant things, like is all the towels clean for the family guests!

24days of little flippable planner and journal stickers

This is something really simple you could do with minimal impact on your day to day journaling, this might involve just using simple flap stickers to your spread and sealing them with a smaller sticker or washi tape. You can put motivational things within the stickers, or affirmations, or things to try, activities or even new foods. If you want you could put some money aside and get yourself some presents for the 24 days.

Subscribing to a fun advent calendar stationery subscription!

If you are wanting to change it up and have the funds to do so, try one of these awesome calendar options! You’ll need to make sure you have the self restraign to not open the windows or packages before the end of the 24 days! I don’t know how much self restraint I would have!