Rainy Day Reads

The stocking is not really something I have been used to doing for Christmas Eve. Rather, we would use a stocking as an advent calendar receptacle rather than wait for Christmas Eve/morning to empty it. Santa would put a gift in your stocking each day or perhaps only some days, and you would get to check the stocking every morning.   When you are little you are quite excited for all the erasers, pens, stickers and tiny toys you receive, but once you get older, you might wish for gifts of better quality and usefulness. This is when Santa perhaps only leaves gifts every few days or so.  I find that it can be hard to balance between buying gifts that are actually wanted and will be used and not blowing your budget on the stocking stuffers alone. Below is a list of some ideas for smaller, but useful gifts, that I think would go well in any stocking. For pampering : Face masks Lip blam Nail polish Small sized body lotion Hand creme For the reader : Inex...

Being grown up my mom doesn’t make my advent calendar anymore. So I decided to make one for myself. Both to keep up my Christmas spirit and as a little treat for myself when the days get dark and dreary.   So I bought some envelopes in a fitting size. I am doing the 24 day calendar so the treats/gifts will be smaller, mostly inexpensive ones. If you want to, you can do the Sunday advent calendar and spend more on those 4 gifts.  I also bought some stickers with the numbers 1-24, since my handwriting is not too decorative. Then I just numbered all the envelopes and started filling them up. Most of it will probably be chocolate, but there are also some inexpensive face masks in there, along with some nail polish, gift cards for smallish amounts, chapstick, small size body lotions and other stuff I happened upon during Christmas shopping.  You can really customize it for the person it’s for. If they are into drawing buy pens, paper, crayons etc. If they ...

I actually don’t know if this is a tradition anywhere else, but in Denmark we make advent wreaths with candles. There are four candles, and each Advent Sunday one more candle is lit, until all four of them are burning. Now the first Advent Sunday was actually this Sunday, the 29th of November. But you still have plenty of time to make and enjoy an advent wreath.   Usually the wreath would be made of pine and decorated with purple ribbons, but these days you can have all sorts of wreaths. Some that aren’t even wreaths as such.  In the spirit of getting myself in the Christmas mood I decided to make my own wreath. I am not very crafty and I don’t have a good eye for interior design and matching stuff, so I thought this might have been a bit of a disaster. But it actually turned out okay, and was very easy. It probably took me five minutes to make, once I had gathered all the bits  and pieces for it.  I used:  A metal tray Four glass jars (I just...