Holiday Countdown without Meltdowns!

"When is it going to be Christmas?" your kids repeatedly ask. Especially if you have a child who relies on visual cues, you'll be answering the question until you're ready to pull your hair out. Or you can keep your hair and instead create an advent calendar to mark the countdown.

This year I've wrapped a simple gift for each day, starting Dec. 1. That gift was a Christmas Kids Bop CD that I was already planning to give my son. And since it couldn't wait until the 25th, it was a perfect advent gift. So I wrapped it and wrote #24 on the gift tag. He has since opened another CD and the new Smurfs DVD. The next gift is a gingerbread house kit.

In other words, I've tried to include festive things that we would enjoy during the holiday season anyway. Why not make them count as extra-special gifts?

Just to balance things out, I've turned an old advent box decoration into a daily service countdown. It has doors for each day, and I've tucked in a service idea behind each one. Some are simple, others a little more involved. I time it for weeknights vs. weekends, when we have a little more time to do something special for someone.

We also made a paper-chain advent for my mother-in-law who is struggling with Alzheimers. Our family wrote words of encouragement or told about a fun memory on each strip of paper. My son even joined in by writing a few words. Pictures would have worked great too. Then we stapled the paper links together and gave it to her when we visited at Thanksgiving. She's delighted to have something bright in her day, and we had a fun time putting the chain together.

Since we've already started December, you could simply modify the activity for the 12 Days of Christmas. And I've found you don't have to purchase gifts. Wrap up some small toy that they've likely forgotten, choose a secondhand item, or do a simple toy swap with a friend. No matter what's inside the gift, your child will just be thrilled to have a present to open.

Thanks to our hands-on craft and daily gifts, on any given day my son knows EXACTLY how many days are left until Christmas. And he's a little more content to wait for his gifts under the tree since he has a little something to look forward to each day.