Did you put together a large Christmas puzzle this year? WAIT! Don’t take it apart just yet! Do what my mom did, and divide it into 25 sections, and put each section into its own lil numbered baggie, and make it an Advent / countdown-to-Christmas calendar for next year! You can number the baggies however you like: maybe you want them RANDOMIZED, so that the little puzzle-segments accumulate on the table but can’t be joined up yet! maybe you want them ORDERLY, so that the upper lefthand corner is day 1, and the next segment to the right is day 2 and joins up with it, and so forth! You can impose your own will, and you can change your mind next year if you want, simply by putting different puzzle-segments into different numbered baggies!
I had photos to illustrate this concept, but I seem to have misplaced them.
Great idea for when the kids are a little older. Do you usually pick a puzzle with 500, 1000, 2000 pieces? Hope you’re having a great time and am looking forward to your posts as they really brighten my day (even if it is mainly snark, which is a relief in the glossy perfect social media world)..
… well, that’s brilliant! Thank you! We’re in chaos and transition right now, but maybe next year we will 1. have a puzzle assembled and 2. be at least likely to be living in the same place the following year, and then 3. Advent Puzzle!
Merry Christmas to you!
This would be very satisfying.
I hope your Christmas is lovely.
Oh that’s a great idea. I actually found a puzzle created for that purpose at a thrift store this year. It has 24 little boxes with the pieces split up into each one. They are actually numbered on the back so that you make sure you have the right ones…maybe to also help put it away correctly at the end of the time? Anyway, when I saw that I thought it was such a great idea because other years I’ve tried to do a Christmas puzzle but a lot of them are really hard the way the art is and so we don’t get it done or it just feels more stressful than it should. So with this one just having a small number each day made it very enjoyable. It is a 1000 piece puzzle. I hadn’t even thought that you could do it yourself.
This is an awesome idea :)
Oooh you could totally fill one of the empty advent calendars that come with boxes to fill as you put it the puzzle away for next year…
No thinking of daily activities/plastic trinkets next November!
YESSSSSS THE EMPTY ADVENT CALENDARS YESSSSSS. I have like THREE now that feel “too good to throw away,” and this would be the PERFECT use for them!!!
Sorry, this comment is unrelated to this post, but I swear that not long ago you posted about creating a “Doom Calendar” for a coworker. Similar to an advent calendar except counting down from Jan 1 to the first day of spring. I’ve been searching every which way for that post but can’t find it. Did I imagine it? Or did I in fact read it somewhere else? It totally seems like something that you would do. Anyway, I created one for my best friend and gave it to her today. Well, I gave her Jan 1-24. I’m still working on the rest. It’s so hard to find tiny things! I’m so looking forward to her starting it and opening it every day. Anyway, I wanted to give credit where credit is due. :-)
It DOES seem like something I would do, but I don’t THINK I’ve done it. (I do sometimes get surprised by things I’ve posted about and forgotten completely.)
I found where I got the idea from! It was from the Ask a Manager advice website: https://www.askamanager.org/2024/11/the-sandwich-party-the-goat-shrine-and-other-unusual-office-traditions.html. For anyone who likes this idea, it was really fun to put together, but it was a lot of work, and some crafting was involved. For one thing, if you use an existing advent calendar, they usually only go from 1-24 or 1-25, so I had to buy four calendars for Jan, Feb, and Mar, and modify some of the doors/drawers to be days higher than 25. And then I had leftover drawers for days after March 20. I made each calendar a little different for each month. And again, even though I got the biggest drawers I could find, it’s hard to find items small enough. I found tiny nail polish, lip balm, book marks, magnets, jewelry, wrapped candy, trinkets, inside jokes. And I left a little note inside for each day. 78 days is a LOT of days to fill, so I had some duplicates. I don’t ordinarily do this much work for a gift, but she’s my bestie, it’s been a lousy year, and next year isn’t looking much better. :-\
Ah ha!! You know what it reminds me of, is the Crappy Day Presents concept. It sounds like the original calendar-maker didn’t do something for every day, but instead made it so someone could decide to open a door when they were having a bad day. Like you, I would have some trouble coming up with (1) enough (2) tiny items for a full countdown—but if I can wrap a little HEAP, and put that heap in a BOX! Well then, I’m in business! The main downside is that it is NOT something for every day (obviously) AND that a person might run out of little gifts before they’ve run out of bad days. So it doesn’t really work as a COUNTDOWN, only as a RESERVE.
I’m almost positive you once talked about saving an Advent calendar and opening it in January instead to get through the doldrums of mid-winter. Maybe the reader was remembering that and the Crappy Day presents in conjunction with the Ask a Manager idea.
I’ll bet you’re right: I have definitely saved advent/countdown calendars to open in the doldrums.
I usually do a Christmas puzzle, but I didn’t this year. However! I bet I could just as easily divide up a puzzle I haven’t done yet into numbered bags. The pieces in each bag would have to be random instead of corresponding to one section at a time, but I’m fine with that.