We’ve been wrapping up Christmas books for the kids and reading one a night all during December for years and years now. It certainly isn’t an idea I originated, and I’m sure most everyone already knows about it, but I posted a photo of our stacks of Christmas books waiting to be wrapped up on Instagram last week and someone asked me to list out some of the books we use. So I decided to do a quick post about it here instead, because I don’t like typing that much on my phone.

Plus I’ve posted some type of Advent calendar idea every year that I’ve been blogging, and….this is it for this year. We usually do this plus something else, but this year the kids are performing in a play every weekend, so things seem too crazy for an activity based calendar (other than the activity of reading a story), and I really can’t get excited about going to a lot of effort to make a calendar full of candy (although I might pick up cheap ones for them at Trader Joe’s or wherever). So you get a post about the book calendar for the first time instead.

If you want to read about Advents past, you can check out my posts about Advent dinosaurs, our cone tree calendar, Christmas crackers, and Advent activity ideas for older kids.

The idea is incredibly simple: you get a bunch of Christmas books together, wrap them up, then open one every day and read it. Or, if you’re like me this year and you’ve accumulated way too many books, you wrap up TWO for every night–one for Abe and one that maybe Abe will listen to or maybe only the older kids will stick around for. I write numbers on all the books, but you might not be as obsessive as I am and like to be surprised every night along with your kids.

Can we stop for a moment to talk about how Target must have sent a spy to my house to find out exactly what kind of wrapping paper I might want before coming up with this year’s designs?

Travel trailers AND bears?! Target–get out of my head! Or stay there and make more things I won’t be able to not buy.

There’s something enormously appealing about a giant stacked of books wrapped up like presents, don’t you think? I’ve done bags before in years past, because they are more recyclable (i.e. you can take a book out of a bag in early December and the same bag can get used again that very year), but it takes up a TON of room under the tree. And it doesn’t look as enormously appealing.

Most of our books have come from the thrift store. I keep an eye out year round, and occasionally I get lucky and come across someone’s discarded stash of Christmas books all on the same shelf and find half a dozen good ones in one fell swoop. We’ve bought some new, too, and I have a few that I either still have from my own childhood or I remember from my childhood and have re-bought on Amazon or ebay. This list is not at all comprehensive; at this point we actually have way more books than we can use in a single year, so we rotate through them….but this is a list of some of our favorites that we make sure to read year after year. Some of them are classics that everyone knows about, and some of them are a little more obscure. Amazon affiliate links ahead (if you buy from my link, you don’t pay anything extra, but I get a few cents. In some cases, you can get these books used for almost nothing, so then I guess I get a small fraction of one cent. Thanks for your support!)