Twenty Four Books You Mostly Already Own
The chocolate advent calendar has a design problem. It goes off at seven in the morning, on an empty stomach, on a school day, and the good part lasts four seconds.
A book advent calendar moves the moment to the end of the day, where there is time for it.
The whole thing takes one evening to set up and gives you twenty four bedtimes that start without an argument, which in December is not a small thing.
Why the reading itself is the point
Jessica Logan and her team at Ohio State worked out how many words a child hears from books before they turn five. A child read to daily hears about 296,660 words. A child never read to hears about 4,662. Five books a day comes out at roughly 1.4 million.
The study, published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics in 2019, is where the phrase million word gap comes from. Twenty four nights will not close a gap that size. But it is twenty four nights, in the month people most often stop doing the ordinary things, and December is exactly when bedtime reading tends to fall over.
We looked at the wider numbers on children and reading in the reading statistics piece, which is the place to go if you want the evidence rather than the craft.
How to build it in one evening
Count what you have. Pull every picture book off the shelf. You will have more than you think, and you only need twenty four.
Fill the gap from the library. A library card covers ten or twelve of the twenty four for nothing. Check the return date lands after Christmas.
Buy two or three. One for the first of December, one for Christmas Eve, and one somewhere in the middle for a night you know will be hard.
Wrap them in ordinary brown paper and number them. Do not tie ribbons. You are going to do this twenty four times and the ribbon will not survive past the fourth.
Then stack them in a basket by the bed, or put them in a bag hung on a hook. A basket is fine. The pictures online show fabric pockets sewn onto a wall hanging, and those are lovely, and nobody needs one.
Ordering matters more than choosing
Put the longest books on the weekend nights. Put the shortest ones on the nights you already know are busy: the school concert, the day you travel, the twenty third.
Keep the loudest and funniest ones away from the last week. The last week is already loud. That is where the quiet ones earn their place.
And leave two unnumbered. One for the night somebody is ill and one for the night everything runs late. A calendar with no slack becomes a job by about the eleventh.
Two more small decisions save trouble later. Put the books in a basket rather than hanging them up, because a hanging one has to be filled in the right order and a basket does not. And number them on the paper in pencil, so you can swap two around at nine at night when a child is too tired for the long one.
Choosing for the child you actually have
For a toddler, repetition is not a failure. The same book twice in twenty four nights is fine. They will unwrap it with the same face both times.
For a five to seven year old, mix picture books with the first few chapter books. One chapter a night from a short novel can fill three or four slots on its own, which cuts the number of books you need.
For a child who finds reading hard, this is one of the better things you can do in December, because the wrapping puts the pleasure back in front of the effort. Keep those books short and let them be read to rather than reading. There is more on that balance in what to do when reading is a fight.
If you want one new book to carry the emotional weight, the feelings books hold up better than the seasonal ones, and we went through those in the big feelings list.
A Little SPOT
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The versions that fail
Buying a boxed set of twenty four unknown titles. They arrive, eight of them are wrong for your child, and you are committed to reading all eight.
Making it a reward. The moment a book is something they get for behaving, it stops being a treat and starts being leverage, and the whole thing sours.
Starting on the first of December with no books wrapped. This is the real failure mode. It is not a lack of enthusiasm, it is that the twenty ninth of November is a busy evening. Wrap them in one sitting in the middle of November and put the basket in a cupboard.
What it turns into
By about the fifth, most children stop caring what the book is and start caring about the unwrapping and the sitting down. That is not a disappointment. That is the thing working.
And it keeps going after the twenty fourth, which the chocolate one never does. The books stay on the shelf. Some years, one of them is still being asked for in June, and nobody remembers which day it came from.
If you want the list of what to actually buy for the two or three new ones, the age by age version is in the books to give instead of a toy.
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Book advent calendar for kids, answered
Twenty four books, wrapped and numbered, with one opened and read each night from the first of December until Christmas Eve.
No. Most families wrap books they already own, borrow ten or so from the library, and buy two or three new ones for the nights that matter.
Two to about eight works best. Older children can do it with one chapter of a short novel per night, which fills several slots from one book.
Mid November, in one sitting. The main reason these fail is that the twenty ninth of November is a busy evening.
Leave two of the twenty four unnumbered as spares. A calendar with no slack becomes a job by about the eleventh of December.
Which book actually changed something at home - and which did you put back?
No right answers here - tell us how it actually went. Someone reading needs to hear it.
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