The Gratitude Advent Wall That Tricked My Kids Into Being Nice to Each Other

Every Thanksgiving we do the thing where you go around the table and everybody says one thing they are thankful for. And sometimes I feel like my kids phone it in. Grateful for skiing. Grateful that everyone is here. Grateful for stuff and things but no one looking longingly into their siblings eyes and saying, "YOU. I am grateful for you." So one Thanksgiving weekend about a decade ago, I came up with a way to make them at least TRY to be thoughtful to one another for twenty-four days straight. I was playing mama chess.

That is the honest origin story of our gratitude advent wall, and I will say up front that it is one of the best little projects I have ever done. If you are in planning mode and love a good holiday love fest, this project is for you.

The whole thing is a long panel of black craft paper taped to a hallway wall and bordered in washi tape. A ribbon runs across the top with twenty four small kraft tags tied along it, numbered one through twenty four. Under each tag a string drops down, and at the bottom of that string a tiny wooden clothespin holds one small envelope. Inside every envelope is a card, and on every card somebody in the family has written something they love about somebody else in the family.

Like a traditional advent calendar, you open one a day.

I stamped each kid's initials onto their envelopes so you could tell at a glance whose night it was, and I let the strings hang long and at slightly uneven lengths because I liked the way they dangled and filled the wall. Neither of those things is necessary. But it helped it look less like a bulletin board.

The math is the part worth thinking about before you buy anything, because this is where a sweet idea turns into a chore nobody wants. I did not want eye rolls. I did not want, "Oh myah Gaaaaahhhhhhh, Mom, seriously??" So, I worked backward from twenty-four and did the least number of cards per day as possible to avoid it feeling like a chore. Kids can write quick notes in 15 minutes. There are six of us, so four cards each got me to twenty-four total cards, one per day. Each kid had to write four cards, a small enough number that nobody complained. Here is a calculator so you can find your own number.

Here is the whole thing, start to finish, in the order I did it. Before anything else, work out your number with the calculator above and set your dates. I did mine on Thanksgiving so the wall would be ready to hang by December 1, which is what turned a Thanksgiving idea into an advent wall.

I handed the cards out at breakfast the morning after Thanksgiving and told everybody they were due by the end of the break, which gave me time to sort and fill before December.

Part one, make the banner.

1. Cut a length of ribbon to span your wall.
2. Cut your triangles.
3. Fold the top edge of each triangle over the ribbon and glue it down.
4. Let it dry.

That is the entire method, and any paper works, including wrapping paper. I used a white rice and bamboo paper from Paper Source and the texture did all the work for me.

Part two, card organization. This is the heart of the matter. It is the part that makes the project work or turns it into a mess, and it is worth reading twice.

1. Stamp the envelopes with the advent day number.
2. Label the cards. Write who each card is FOR, and leave the FROM blank so the writer signs their own name.
3. Shuffle the labeled cards and deal them into piles, one pile per participant.
4. Put each pile into its own envelope labeled with that person's name.
5. Hand the envelopes out and set a deadline.

On step one, if you are only doing one note per day, you can stamp the recipient's name or initial instead, which is what I did.

Step two is easy to miss or discount but it keeps things straight. My husband wrote one of the loveliest cards in the entire pile and forgot to sign it. It is still unsigned. We all know who wrote it.

On step three, once the TO names were on, I honestly just shuffled the whole stack blind and dealt them out. No strategy at all. If you want to get clever about it, stack the deck so the two who fight the most each get one or two cards about each other. That is the entire subversive point of this project.

The envelope in step four is the FROM envelope, the one you hand over to your beasts. Those are the cards that person is responsible for writing. Include everybody, including the ones who cannot write yet. My youngest had extremely firm opinions and dictated every single one of hers to me. I was a willing scribe.

Part three, assemble and hang.

1. Put the black paper up with painters tape, washi tape, or painters tape with decorative washi run over the top.
2. Hang your ribbons across the top of the paper.
3. Hang the banner above the ribbons.
4. Hot glue a string to each envelope if you are doing the hanging version.
5. Clip the envelopes on with the tiny wooden clothespins.

Test your own wall first, though, and do not take my word for it. I would hate to be responsible for ruining your walls. And let the strings hang at different lengths. The uneven lengths are what make it look festive instead of institutional.

You will notice my photos do not quite match the steps, and that is because there are two ways to run this. I did one person per day, so the envelopes are marked with a kid's initial and the day number lives on a kraft tag tied up on the ribbon. That kid knows it is their night and they do the opening.

The other way is better in one specific respect. Label the envelopes with the date only, put cards for several different people inside, and nobody knows who is in there until it is opened. Then you rotate who does the reading. Who is inside becomes the surprise, which is a completely different and honestly livelier dinner than the one we had. If I did it again I might do it that way.

One more sort, and it is the easiest to miss because it sounds like the sort you already did. Dealing the cards out decides who writes what. This second sort decides what gets opened when, and it happens after all the cards come back to you. When I filled the envelopes, I did not go random, even though I told myself I would. I went through and made sure the same person was not the subject three nights in a row. In my family it is very easy for one kid to feel neglected and another to feel like the designated star, and neither one leads to gratitude. So, I load-balanced.

If your family is less sensitive than mine, sort randomly and let the chips fall. It can be genuinely fun when one person gets a whole pile in a single night.

I do not know what your therapist would say about this, but I am going to recommend pulling full mom rank. If you have two in the family that are constantly at each other and cannot settle, this quietly forces them to come up with something nice to say.

My mom used to say if you cannot say anything nice, do not say anything at all, and I assumed everybody's mom said that. Lately I am not sure everyone got that same message, so I am reviving it. And if the nice thing turns out to be the same compliment over and over, I will take it. I will take it over sibling rivalry any day.

The supplies are almost nothing, and the only thing I actually went out and bought for this was the roll of black paper. Everything else came out of my own stash: the green leaf garland and the twine from Paper Source, the other ribbons and strings from Michaels, and a wooden alphabet and number stamp set I had picked up years earlier out of one of those checkout bins at Michaels that sit right before the register, full of things you absolutely do not need until suddenly you do.

If you are not sitting on a decade of craft supplies, here is the whole list, and it is genuinely cheap. These are affiliate links, which means if you buy through one I earn a small amount at no extra cost to you.

Small coin envelopes, 2.25 by 3.5 inches. If you are doing this with a bigger group, get the larger pack.

Blank cards. I like watercolor paper for these, because the heavy texture feels like something worth keeping. Deckle-edge versions are beautiful, but the rough edges are harder to slide neatly into a coin envelope.

Tiny wooden clothespins, and an honest note: mine were flimsy and too itty bitty. These are the ones I would buy if I did it again, and they come with twine.

Wooden alphabet and number stamp set. This one includes an ink pad, so you can skip buying one separately unless you want a second color. I used black and red.

Metallic gold baker's twine, if you want the shine and did not get twine with the clothespins.

Black kraft paper roll.

Washi tape for the border.

An ultra fine Sharpie for the cards, which you already own.

One more thing, because I did not see this until years later. Nothing about this is specific to a family. It is twenty-four small notes, a roll of paper, and about fifteen dollars, and it is completely non-denominational, so anybody can do it. It would work in an office, on a team that needs a bonding exercise, in a classroom, or in a church group. Same rules apply: write the TO in advance, let people sign their own name, and rotate who reads. If you have ever sat through a mandatory team building activity and wished it were something people actually meant, this is that.

The opening was better than I could have predicted, and it left a record. We read them at dinner and whenever we remembered, the kids took turns, and obviously, everybody had to be present for any and all openings. Everyone actually listened, sometimes there were nods of agreement, sometimes a discussion followed, but mostly it was just nice for a minute. Nice to just sit and reflect on the good parts.

I still have those cards. Some of them were not deep, and some were things we'd already said out loud. It did not matter, because now it is written down. Sometimes you are in the middle of your own family thinking nobody here really sees you, and then a decade later you read four sentences on a business card and find out they did.

Full disclosure. I did this more than a decade ago, when all of my kids were younger and living in my house full time. Now one lives abroad with an ocean between us, one is in college hundreds of miles away, one is cooking and exploring the United States with his girlfriend, and I have one beautiful, mouthy kid left at home. Which means those little cards stopped being a craft project and became a treasure, and I will keep them for the rest of my life, because they are the proof that during that magical stretch when I had them all to myself, I stopped for a second, miraculously, and appreciated it.

If this gave you an idea worth trying, there's more where it came from. Follow along on Pinterest (@CraftandBondCo) and Instagram (@craftandbondco) for new projects, recipes, and the occasional honest mess, and save this post so you can find your way back to it.