This Muffin Tray Advent Calendar craft is fun to make with your kids - and even more fun to fill with treats for December and the run up to Christmas! The muffin trays are a more useful size than the standard advent calendar if you would like to include a small gift each day. There are all sorts of little toys and treats that will fit into a muffin tin, if you put your mind to it.
You will need:
Muffin trays or individual pie cases totalling 24 spaces (we used a combination of disposables but you could also use 2 12-muffin baking trays)
Wrapping paper (not the foil type)
Marker pens (or number stickers, scrapbook embellishments etc)
Glue or sticky tack
Alternatives (see below):
Last year's Christmas cards
Sticky tape
Colouring equipment, stickers etc
Instructions:
Cut 24 circles of wrapping paper - a 3 inch circle paper punch or a die-cutting machine comes in very handy here! (If you don't have one you can always cut through several layers of wrapping paper at once).
Write a number from 1 to 24 on each circle, or use stickers.
Fill the muffin tray spaces with your advent treats. Glue around the edge of each pie case and stick on a circle. If you are using a real muffin tray which you want to use again, use small blobs of sticky tack to hold the paper circles in place. You will probably need 3 or 4 small blobs per circle.
Now it is just a question of opening up one container every day. Because we used disposable trays, thin paper and glue, we get to punch through the paper every morning!
Alternatives:
Use last year's Christmas cards and leftover scraps of wrapping paper to make the circles - you can get a really pretty patchwork effect this way.
Instead of muffin trays, you could use small paper cups. Buy a Christmas design, or use plain white and get the children to decorate them first with pencils, crayons and stickers. Tape the circles securely over the top when you have filled the cups so that children can shake them each day and guess what is inside - very exciting!
