A Bookish Christmas Tradition for the Petites

A couple of years ago I saw a pin on Pinterest about different types of advent calendars and one of them was all about books. Of course I immediately wanted more information. Basically it is incredibly simple and a great way to promote literacy in a fun and festive way. What you need are 25 Christmas or winter books one for each day until Christmas.

Initially, I thought that this would be really hard to get my hands on 25 books, but when I dug through our books I already had 10. Getting the rest can be as simple or detailed as you would like it to be. I picked up a bunch of board books at the Target dollar bins. Another great place to get holiday books are used bookstores. If you don’t want to buy a bunch of books right now you can always hit up your local public library for some great titles to fill in the gaps.

Another idea would be to start with the 12 days of Christmas, that way you wouldn’t have to stress yourself out trying to find 25 books the first year and then you could build your collection over time. I’ve realized that I am missing some very classic holiday books (How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Bear Stays Up for Christmas, and The Mitten) that I need to get my hands on when I replace some of the board books next year. Part of the fun is finding out which books will become new family favorites. Another aspect that is so fun is that the books are put away after the holidays and only brought out for this, so there is a huge excitement when the wrapped books appear on the first of December.

It’s in the details: How it works, get your books and wrap them up, then each night your petites open a new book for story time. Lots of amazing bloggers out there have special wrapping paper and lovely cut tags, I went the low-key route this year and wrapped in paper I had (it doesn’t match) and am going to just write the number on the book with a silver marker.

There are lots of options for the 25th book, some families choose to use the Bible or The Night Before Christmas. There are so many options of fabulous Christmas books that you might be surprised at how fun it is to collect books for this bookish tradition. Enjoy!

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