May our children grow in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.
The Inspiration For the Advent Calendar Books
As Christmas was approaching the year our son was born in 2019, I began to think about family traditions. Growing up Catholic, we always had at least one advent calendar around the house. One in particular I loved. I began to think of ways my husband and I could ensure that our son would know the true meaning of Christmas.
Like many young children, our son loved books. A thought came to my mind that an advent calendar of books would be a perfect tradition! I searched online and found a few single books with 24 stories, but at 6 months, our son lost interest unless I was flipping pages.
The first Christmas came and went and after more searching for a-book-a-day Advent calendar, I started to lose hope that it existed. As I was expressing my disappointment to my mom on the phone one day, she said, “Why don’t you just write them?!” As a full-time working mom, this seemed impossible.
Then, Covid hit. I found myself working from home, and without the commute time, I gained about 90 minutes each day. Eventually, the laundry was caught up and the dishes were washed. I found myself wondering what to do with the extra minutes. Then I realized maybe I really could write those books!
The Process of Writing the 24 Books
I’ve never written a book in my life. But, I thought—I could create a set just to have for us as a family.
I’m going to be honest. It had been a very long time since I’d picked up a bible outside of church and started reading.
I created an outline—this took months. I knew that I wanted something that would prepare our hearts to the celebration of Jesus’ birth. I wanted something chronological.
I struggled with the thought that I may spend a lot of time, money and energy creating these books and then our son would outgrow them immediately—especially at the pace I was keeping during this writing process. So I had another idea—two books in one!
Talk about adding more to my plate. Now, I essentially had 48 stories to write! But I was really enjoying reading the bible stories, learning about the Old Testament, challenging myself to understand the timeline in Luke and Matthew. So—I kept chugging along.
I was reinvigorated after the birth of our daughter in 2022. I spent a big chunk of nap time during maternity leave working with my illustrator to create the visual representations for the books, refining the stories, etc.
The First Edition of the Advent Calendar Books
I completed and printed the first set of books at the end of 2023. They were not fully proofed had many imperfections, but I didn’t care—I wanted to start the family tradition that had been on my heart for 4 years. I was super proud of what I had accomplished, but something was still nagging at me. What if there was another family searching for this exact thing? I had done the work—why not publish it and make it available?
The Publishing of the Book Set
I learned extremely quickly “Why Not”.
The cost—wow. I had done some work upfront to make sure that I was going to have a high-quality, hardback book set for my family at the absolute lowest cost. It isn’t cheap to print 24 hardback books!
I reached out to some publishers who wanted thousands to publish. I considered self-publishing through other sites who wanted to sell EACH book for $36+ before shipping, making the cost for the set almost $900! That isn’t something I could afford and I wouldn’t want to ask others to pay that either. My intent isn’t to make a bunch of money on these books—I just wanted them to be available for anyone interested.
While the hardback books are available for purchase, I wanted to more affordable route. With the encouragement of the TikTok community, I decided to self-publish paperback copies on Amazon. The paperback sets are also available to purchase on the “shop” page of this site but honestly, Amazon ships much more quickly!
Etsy
I’m a big fan of printed books, but as a millenial, I know we live in a digital world. The books are also available as digital downloads on my Etsy shop!
YouTube
My most recent endeavor was to upload video versions of each book onto YouTube so that everyone can enjoy the tradition for free! YouTube.com/@AdventBookSet
adventbookset.com 