A Homemade Advent Calendar

I love coming with up with fun new ideas for Advent calendars and there are plenty out there to choose from. I've worked on a few this year, but I'll get to that  a little later. Today I want to show off my advent calendar because I love it!

My awesome friend Emily gave it to me and packaged it so sweetly in two cute, reusable bags she sewed herself.

I opened up the packages on December first and was delighted to see that Em had not only included an individually wrapped and labeled package for each day, she had also already threaded them with yarn so that all I had to do was hang them up! Of course, I promptly found the most prominent spot in our living room to do so and voilà. (Some of the packages were a bit heavy, so I used our curtain tie hooks, which I knew were stable enough to hold them.)

The sticker labels are from Oh Happy Day. I'd been admiring them the week before and love that they're now part of my holiday decor. I think our windows look much more festive with all those cute packages hanging there, don't you?

It's so nice to have a little surprise to look forward to every morning! Here are my presents from days 1 and 2. Clearly, I need to get my cookie-baking on asap.

What kind of Advent calendar are you using this year?

ps. In sad news, our DSLR lens is having a bit of an...issue lately, we'll say, and is in need of a camera doctor visit. So my fancy schmancy cell phone camera will have to suffice for pictures for a while. Sniffle sniffle.