Advent Calendar Pt 3 – Dan’s Nisse Land Advent

Growing up, my home was always decorated with little Nisser. They were mostly made from pipe cleaner, felt, yarn or crocheted and would be all around the house climbing up whatever they could, obviously looking to cause mischief. For me it is not quite Christmas without these little guys, and while shops like Sostrene Grene and Tiger (Flying Tiger Copenhagen) are now filling my Christmas decor void in the UK by having more Scandinavian type decor, I still decided I would make my own this year.

It was after I made a few that I got an idea for Dan’s advent calendar. As I was cleaning up, I discovered that two of the nisser I had made had gone missing. After looking everywhere, I discovered one perched on Dan’s computer looking rather pensive at his desktop screen. “He’s thinking” said Dan and since Dan liked them so much I thought a little Nisse land would be perfect.

Now, this advent was a little more difficult to organise as Dan works from home and is essentially around all the time! While I got all the items to fill up the calendar easily enough, it was the actual making of everything without prying eyes that was the most difficult to organise – especially as I knew I would be working another series of nights and unsociable hours over the next few weeks. (This explains the terrible lighting in the making of photos!)

Luckily for me, there were others such as Delia creates and Cathe Holden who had done a similar advent village or paper house mobile who had templates for the houses available for download, so all I needed to do was print them off, cut and glue them together with my handy glue gun. (You are life savers!) While I loved the variation of designs that Delia had, I must say that the Cathe Holden houses worked a lot better for holding presents. So most of Delia’s houses are used for tea lights (battery tea lights, you can get them at Hobbycraft!) and once again I used A4 Brown Kraft Cardboard. And because every village needs trees I used the same design from my Tree Advent Calendar and for snow, I got a snow blanket from TheRange UK.

Slide left and right to see the differences

However, as not all the presents I bought for Dan’s Advent Calendar are the same shape I had to get a bit creative with my village. Here are some examples (also if you are wondering, I have banned Dan from reading this post!)

The coasters I got him became the sign for the village.
A bucket of buttons which is acting as an old school lamp post.
Scrabble chocolate game which is our slope for sledding.
Nutella & Go which has become our sled.
Cans of beer which are large tree logs to sit on.