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jenn

Murder by Death

I read cozy and historical mysteries, a bit of Paranormal/UF, and to mix it up, I read science and gardening books on occasion.

16 Tasks of the Festive Season - Square 5: Advent

Tasks for Advent: Post a pic of your advent calendar. (Festive cat, dog, hamster or other suitable pet background expressly encouraged.) 

 

Bonus task:  make your own advent calendar and post it.

 

Technically, it's not my own Advent calendar, but MT's.  I make a beer advent calendar for him every year.  He gets one bottle of, hopefully, new-to-him craft beer each day.  I find it works wonders helping him find his Christmas spirit.

 

I say hopefully because this is year 3 and no, I'm not organised AT ALL about how I do this, so every year I'm at the shop, with, luckily, the same sales guy, and he and I go through the stock pulling beers off the shelves with comments like:  

 

What about this one?  No... I think he had that last year...what about this one?  Definitely not - he won't appreciate guava, sage and pineapple in his beer... Oh! this is a new one and he'll really like it!

 

There's also a lot of me pulling beers off the shelves because they have pretty labels or hilarious names and the Purvis guy (Purvis is the shop name) telling me I have the worst taste in beer, but great taste in marketing. 

 

I DID get organised in one respect this year:  instead of buying gobs of tissue paper to wrap the bottles in, I had the brainstorm of buying some fabric remnants, and wrapping the bottles in those instead, making them re-useable year to year.  I cut them into the proper size, and then added two grommets to feed a ribbon through, allowing me to easily tie the whole thing up.  I used all the bits of ribbon I've saved from previous years' holidays, so each is a bit different (and not always a good color combo, but oh well).

 

I also got proactive about the numbered labels:  I bought a set of craft paper swing tags, drew as nice a set of numbers on them as I could, added a grommet and they'll now be the permanent day numbers for future years.  Earlier this year, I bought a nice old wooden box to put the bottles in too, so future years, this SHOULD be a snap to pull together; maybe then I can start keeping track of which beer I buy from year to year.

 

So, the finished product:

Without tags or cat.

 

With tags.

 

 With tags *and* cat.