25 Days of Christmas Activities List For Christmas Countdown + FREE Printables!
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25 Days of Christmas Activities List For Christmas Countdown + FREE Printables!
Looking for 25 days of Christmas activities and Advent ideas? We have shared a huge list below of many things you can do to celebrate for all 25 days. Plus, we have a free printable you can use to track all of the things you want to do over that timeframe. This will hopefully inspire your family to have lots of fun together, building plenty of memories in the days leading up to Christmas Eve.
Find all sorts of fun ideas of activities that you could do for your 25 Days of Christmas Activities. Keep in mind that we have given you ideas to do 25 Days of Activities, but you do not have to do the full 25 days till Christmas! Do whatever works best for your families.
The idea here is to create fun and wonderful memories with your family. So be inspired by the things that your family would enjoy, but don’t put so much pressure on your schedule that it gets stressful. I love to mix smaller activities with one bigger one per week. Or maybe only commit to doing them a few days a week.
You can also read about the 25 Days of Christmas and find a variety of different Advent calendars that you can make yourself! Or just keep it really simple & have your kids help you make a red & green paper chain & you can write the activities on each of the links for the chain. Then have one child pull off a link each day with that day’s activity.
You could do a Christmas Countdown for 12 Days of Christmas Activities or 5 Days of Christmas Activities – whatever seems most doable to your family!
Free Printable List of Christmas Activities + Free Blank List for your Family::
We have created several free printables for you to use as you plan your Christmas Countdown activities. We have a list of Christmas activities to do with your family that you can print off & use as inspiration as you plan your own family’s fun Christmas activities to do in December. Plus, we also have a blank list that you can personalize either by printing it off & writing your own list or typing up your list using our editable PDF so you can have a personalized list of Christmas activities for your family.
Here is the 25 Days of Christmas Activities List Free Printable – you can print off yours and keep it on a memo board or on your fridge at home and it will help you plan your activities to do at any time during the month. This is helpful whether you are going to be doing daily activities for the 25 Days of Christmas Advent activity or if you just want ideas of fun family activities to do periodically during the month as well.
We also have made a 25 Days of Christmas Blank List for Activities, where you can write in or type up your own list of activities.
You can use this blank list in two ways::
- Print off the blank list & write in your own activities as you plan out your month of activities (or however many days you are going to do special activities like 12 Days of Christmas, etc)
- Type in this list of Christmas Activities and then print it off when you are done to have a personalized list of Christmas activities for your family. You will need to make sure you have Adobe Reader installed to be able to edit this PDF and fill in the lines with your own activities. {Adobe Reader is a free program to install on your computer} Once you have typed up your list on the lines provided, you can then print off your personalized list of Christmas activities!
Northwest Christmas Activities List:
If you’re in the Northwest, make sure to check out our big list of Pacific Northwest Christmas Events to find some local activities you could add to the list, too.
Read a Christmas Book A Night:
Another idea for fun Christmas Countdown Activities is to read a Christmas book every day during the month of December until December 25th, as you count down to Christmas. This can be as simple as you’d like! You can use Christmas books you have on hand at your house or books you get at the library. Wrap them up for a a special surprise as to which book they will read each night or put all the books in a basket to let your kids choose each night. We have a list of 40 of our favorite Christmas books for kids, too.
Ideas for Advent Activities for Families:
- Chocolate Advent Calendar – Give each of your kids a chocolate Advent Calendar to use with your homemade advent calendar (you can find these at the Dollar Store, Walgreens, Fred Meyer, World Market, Walgreens, Hallmark,). This is a great activity to do on December 1st
- Visit a Living Nativity – a great way to kick off the season of Advent & focus on the true reason for the season!
- Picnic next to the Christmas tree
- Birthday party for Jesus – have a little birthday party for Jesus & invite your friends or just do it with your family. Make a birthday cake for Jesus
- Red & Green Dinner – serve food & drinks that are either red or green for dinner (if you’re really ambitious, you could even do this for every meal & make it Red & Green Day)
- Make Homemade Ornaments – check out these fun Salt Dough ornaments
- Christmas craft day – find some Christmas crafts to do together to decorate your house or to give to family or friends. Grab a KiwiCo Crate to have fun activities on hand for a craft day, with all the supplies needed.
- Make homemade Peppermint Hot Chocolate or go out to Starbucks or a local coffee shop for a fun little outing to get a special Holiday flavored Hot Chocolate
- Decorate Gingerbread Houses
- Make candied popcorn & Have a Game Night (maybe buy a new game & wrap it for them to open – it could be from a thrift store, it doesn’t have to be brand-new – just new to them)
- Write letters to Santa – use our free printable letter to Santa
- Cut down your Christmas tree at a Tree Farm or go to pick it out from a lot (find a list of U-Cut Christmas Tree Farms in the NW)
- Decorate the tree & drink eggnog
- Balloon Volleyball – set up a mini volleyball court in your house using balloons as your volleyball! This is sure to cause a lot of laughs!
- Date night with dad or mom
- Hot cocoa & Christmas books next to the Christmas tree or by the fire
- Christmas movie marathon night (or day)
- Make paper snowflakes & decorate the windows, hang them from fishing line in your hall or entryway or make Tortilla snowflakes!
- Put on PJ’s, bring hot cocoa & go see local Christmas light displays in neighborhoods (check out our copycat Starbucks hot chocolate recipe)
- Or do a Christmas Scavenger Hunt!
- Make edible gifts for the birds
- Make footprint reindeer or penguin (we made the reindeer one year as ornaments, but you could also do it on canvas for a fun holiday picture to hang on your walls at Christmas)
- Go ice skating (find a list of Outdoor Ice Skating Rinks in the NW)
- Make red & green homemade playdough
- Sleep on the floor under the Christmas tree one night
- Read the true story of Christmas (Luke 2: 1-20)
- Write notes to each member of the family telling them how special they are & leave them in their stockings to open Christmas morning
- Kids Choice day or night – Kids get to choose the meal, game, movie, and more!
- Make Christmas Cookies, like reindeer cookies, and more ideas
If any of your activities involve something you will give to your kids, you could wrap those up to correspond with the appropriate date. This just adds to the anticipation and fun for them.
Here are a few examples of things you can wrap up::
- Chocolate Advent Calendar
- New Christmas PJ’s
- Wrap a new-to-them Christmas book or movie that you’ll read or watch as a family
- Give them a new (or new-to-them) toy Nativity set and then act out the Christmas story
- Wrap up the fixins for popcorn & movie night in a fun basket or tub!
Giving/Service Ideas:
- Gather allowance money & put it in the Salvation Army bucket (or even better, volunteer as a bell ringer to help raise money for your local Salvation Army – we will be doing that this year again with our whole family – my girls had a blast doing this last year)
- Have a shopping date with mom or dad to buy a gift for their sibling(s)
- Bake & take cookies to a local organization like a nursing home, veteran’s home, hospital, youth center, etc
- Bake cookies & bring to your local fire station (maybe they’ll even give you a tour of the station & the trucks)
- Make gifts or treats for the neighbors & deliver them together – we always do this one day close to Christmas
- Gather up toys to donate – this has an added bonus that it also clears the way for new toys coming at Christmas
- Make Christmas gifts for teachers
- Adopt a family or a child for the Christmas season – through Toys for Tots, a local angel/giving tree, your church or school – have your children help you shop for the items
- Go Christmas caroling in your neighborhood or at a local nursing home, hospital, or rehab center
- “Pay it Forward” Day – look for opportunities to pay it forward such as buying coffee for the person behind you at the coffee shop, giving the cashier a gift card at the store you are shopping at, and any other random opportunities you come across where you can do something nice to “pay it forward” to people
*You can find more activities & inspiration on our Instagram page here too.
Random Acts of Kindness Activities:
Hopefully, this gets you a good start on ideas that you could include in your 25 Days of Christmas! Now, it’s your turn – we’d love to hear what type of fun activities you like to do as a family to celebrate the Christmas season.
Photo Credits to My friend Sarah for the beautiful advent calendar
We have our 25 socks strung across the fireplace and ready for the “elves” to deliver something tonight in each one of them for a countdown to Christmas. We love to go to Snowflake Lane in Bellevue, hand out special gifts to all our neighbors, cut down a tree and decorate, buy toys and other things for Toys for Tots and other organizations and bake some cookies for teachers and others.
Thank you so much for these great ideas! I was just sitting down to write down our 25 days of Christmas countdown and this helped so much!
Love these ideas and love the whole 25 days idea. We’re doing something similar this year, just not quite as organized. I’m just adding a few ideas each week to my planner (crafts, baking cookies, etc). There are so many things we want to do this month and it just flies so quickly by!
just wanted to say thank you so much for all the wonderful ideas I have been looking for a diy advent calender and havent found anything I like but I love these ideas thanks again Merry Christmas and God bless!!
We always like to volunteer for Toys for Tots every year. If you can volunteer the Marines could always use helpers and anybody can help. It’s fun to take the whole family to help out, it gives the kids a chance to see how much they actually have and be grateful for it.
Love all the great ideas! I like to wrap up 25 Christmas-themed books that I’ve collected over the years for my classroom and have my daughter open up one to read each evening until Christmas.
We have been doing this for years. The first night is always a scavenger hunt, usually new children’s Bibles, one year the little people nativity set, this year it’s Christmas activity type books. We try to tie in our regular family activities into it and if I’m really tired or busy or behind is when they draw the let’s make cocoa and watch a Christmas show :)
What a fun idea to do a scavenger hunt, Misty! I love it! My daughter just suggested tonight it would be fun to hide the stockings we use with the activities inside around the house to find, but i love your idea even more! And yes, definitely gotta use the activities you already do & we definitely go for easy ones during the week! Tonight it was making paper snowflakes to decorate our front hall with & then tomorrow night will probably be a Christmas movie with cocoa too! Definitely doesn’t have to be complicated, but kids love anticipation!
This website is very helpfu when it around Christmas and the hoiladay`s!