Homemade Advent Calendar Box-o-Presents

    Advent calendars are a pretty normal seasonal thing where I grew up and available sometimes at some online stores or import shops in Japan, but when it comes down to it, I no longer really find the activity of opening little doors for tiny chocolate surprises to be worth the expense of the product, especially as an import. If you have a little bit of time and creativity, why not make something a little bit more personal for kids or really anyone in your life?

    I didn't actually come up with this idea. One of my friends had an advent box from her mother, filled with things that she knew she would use like socks or underwear in addition to small knickknacks and snacks. I tried this once when my kid was really small-- too small to really care about the whole activity. This year, I decided to try again and had been gathering items here and there for a few weeks before December started. Most items were from the 100 yen store (handkerchiefs and bath balls mostly), cute gashapon, or educational puzzle books she requested a few months ago. Finally on the 1st, I got to set about wrapping them all, adding a number to each one. The wrapping doesn't have to be perfect and the items don't have to be expensive. The goal is to provide a fun way to mark the days heading into the holidays.

    I've done this for my kid once before, back from the age of two, when she had no idea what I was talking about or what the numbers were supposed to mean. This time, she is well aware of her dates and is excited about the idea of tiny presents.     As I mentioned before, not all of these gifts are great, but all of them were bought with her in mind.         

    I like the idea of balancing small gifts for days 1-4 on top of the day 5 gift, which is a larger rectangular object and repeating that in 5 days cycles until we get to the 25th. Another option would be to keep most of the presents right around the same size until the last one or last five. There are many ways to do this depending on who you're doing it for and what you're putting inside. I would love to have a collection of 25 gashapon capsules to use for this at some point, but this year I only had a few to throw in.

    While as of this writing it's too late to start from day one on a new advent calendar for 2021, it's not too late for a 10-day calendar or a week-long calendar leading up to Christmas.
    If you were opening an advent calendar box of tiny presents, what would you want to find inside?