With Christmas rapidly approaching what could be better than some great Christmas themed crafts to keep the children entertained. Making customised calendars with you children is a fun activity and with this great guide couldn’t be easier. This guide includes a blank calendar to printout and some great festive decorations to get you started in December.

You will need

- A printer

- Thirteen sheets of A4 Paper per calendar

- A pair of Scissors

- A glue stick

- Colouring pencils or pens

- A hole punch

- String

Step 1 – Print the calendar

In this guide there will be a link to a PDF containing the blank calendar. The calendar containing thirteen months (Dec 2012 to Dec 2013) and is formatted so each month fits nicely on a price of A4 paper when it is landscape orientation. To print out the guide open the PDF either on your computer or in your web browser and press print, this should bring up your printer settings make sure that the page orientation is set to landscape or they won’t print correctly and then press print.

Click here for the PDF containing the blank calendar

Step 2 – Organise the pages

Once you have printed all the pages you need to make sure they are organised correctly, as sometimes printers print them out in the wrong order. What you will want is a pile of paper with the latest month on top (Dec 2012) and furthest away month (Dec 2013) on the bottom.

Step 3 – Make some holes

Once you have all 13 pages organised and lined up you need to make a couple of holes at the top through all the pages. This is best done with a hole-punch as you can get all the pages in one go making it better lined up and neat.

Step 4 – Tie the pages together

Now that you have all the pages hole punched it’s time to bind them together. This can be done in a number ways but the easiest is to probably take a length of string and thread it through so both ends come out of the top as shown above.

Once the string is poking out of the top all you need to do is tie it together with a strong knot. Once tied you should have a great blank calendar that can be flipped as the months change.

Part 5 -Decorate the calendar

You should now have a lovely blank calendar ready for you kids to decorate. This will be the most fun part of the activity and your children can really express their creativity and get involved here. The first step of decorating is to collect together lots of great relevant images that can be used to decorate each month. Some great ideas for this are:

- Family photos

- Cut outs from Christmas cards

- Hand drawings.

- Magazine cut outs

- Wrapping paper

- Printouts

These are a just a few ideas, but the possibilities of what you could use are endless. Once you have your images simply cut them out arrange them into a nice scene and stick them on. I would suggest using safety scissors when little ones are involved and a glue stick to save you a lot of mess.

This guide includes some great Christmas themed print outs to get you started with December. They are easy to cut out and their simple style makes them easy to colour in adding even more fun to the activity. You can ether do all the months at once or decorate each month as it comes as this can be a great learning experience for young ones to teach them about the various months and events.

This activity guide was designed by Sam Fisher on behalf of Vistaprint the online gift retailer that supply some wonderful products including Personalised calendars