Yesterday I mentioned how I worked on a new Christmas book system for my family to use this year. I liked the surprise element of wrapping books, but I don’t like to wrap. I also have a hard time doing a specific activity for 25 days straight. Some days we like to read through 3 books, and other days none at all. I also wanted to incorporate iPad book reading and listening into our Christmas book tradition. That’s hard to wrap under a tree. So I came up with a Christmas Book book (I couldn’t think of another name to call it at 1:00 am.)

I’m hoping that this little book will become a fun Christmas book tradition. Would you like to see how I made it and plan to use it?

Christmas Book Count-Down

Supplies:

Pick coordinating scrapbook paper and trim to 4×6. I went ahead and made enough for 25 days, but with this system you can do more or less.

Number and decorate the pages and then slip into the photo album. I decided to do a green and red pattern.

The next step was probably the hardest. If you noticed in my supply picture above, my little photo album was purple flowers. That’s not very Christmas-y. This particular photo album also did not have a way to slip in a new piece of paper for the cover. Since it is plastic, finding an adhesive that wouldn’t peel off made covering it with paper a pain. So what I did was carefully use an Exacto-knife to open up the top-inside cover of the album. I used a metal ruler to guide the cut along the inside seam. I would have taken a picture but I couldn’t figure out how to hold the knife and shoot the camera at the same time. 🙂 Once I did that, I was able to pull out the purple cardboard cover. I glued scrapbook paper onto that and then inserted it back into the album. I did the same for the back of the album too.

Then using my favorite photo-editing program, I created another 4×6 insert with all the Christmas book titles. I know what you’re thinking–wrapping the books would have been easier. I see your point, but I’m hoping that this will last a couple of years!

Once I was done with the book inserts, I slipped them randomly behind the numbers.

So How Does This Work?

You can structure it two different ways. To act like a Christmas-countdown calendar, or to act like a Christmas book collection counter. I chose the latter for this year.

During the month of December, for our read-aloud time, one child will pick a tag from behind the number. They’ll see the book cover image and go pick that book out of the book basket to read. If we want to read more than one, then the next child will pull the tag out from page number 2 etc. After we are done reading, we will put the books we read on display in the front room. Then we will write the date we read the book on the back of the book tag. If we happened to add an activity to go along with the book, we’ll write that info. too. Then we will place the tag in front of the number in the Christmas book so we know where we left off.
I know that I will probably be adding an iPad book or two as well. I am hoping that this will let my kids have some element of surprise and will be a good way to record some memories of the books we read (or listened to) together by jotting down little tid-bits on the back of the book cards. I’m looking forward to trying this out in a couple of days!

If you are interested in doing a version of this Christmas Book Book, you can download blank 4×6 book inserts. You can either write the name of the book or add the photos yourself to match your book collection.

Be sure to check out our list of Christmas books and activities for more inspiration!