I'm crafty but not duplicitous

This year I'm doing a holiday countdown to December 25th with little gifts for the kids. Often this is called an Advent calendar and it counts down to Christmas. But we don't observe Advent, and if we did, we would have started on the 4th Sunday before Christmas and counted down to December 25th. What we're doing is a small gift for each day from Dec 1st-24th. And we're only doing it because I saw this cute craft idea where you sew the little gifts into brown paper and then hang them from a string garland. I thought, "that's cute and fun and will be totally easy!" Which, of course, it is, but you still have to have TIME. And not just regular time but time WITHOUT CHILDREN. Oh yeah, that. I'm pretty sure that sort of time is mythical.

Anyway, I collected up some little gifts. There are plastic snakes, marbles, little notebooks, etc. I completely avoided candy - yeah me! I then completely slacked on collecting up any brown paper bags. They just don't grow on trees anymore, you know? I could have sewed up our reusable bags but that would have 1) been a tough gift to open and 2) ruined all our bags.

The solution - thrift store picture book. I used the pages of a book that had lovely pictures but a trite storyline as wrapping for the gifts. Here they all are:

After sewing up the gifts, I then took some tags I had and sewed them on by hand. Sandis did the dates for me:

Then came a small problem. In the process of avoiding candy, some of the little gifts became a wee bit heavy for a garland. I switched tactics and put them in this lovely Santa tin that I found at the thrift store for <$2. Perfect!