At the beginning of the year, I set only one goal for myself: do one random act of kindness each week. It hasn’t been easy every week, but it’s been a wonderful challenge. At times it’s helped me get out of my own head and focus on the needs of others. Hopefully, it’s helped me become a more considerate human being [obviously this is a constant work in progress].
Throughout the year I’ve shared a few of my favorite acts of kindness [in this post and this post], but I wanted to do something more fun for the year-end finale. According to Pinterest, random acts of kindness are a popular way to celebrate the holidays. It’s not by any means an original idea, but I pulled together my very favorite acts from the entire year into an easy-to-make-at-home advent calendar.
random acts of kindness advent calendar
There are lots of random acts of kindness lists on the internet, even others organized as an advent calendar. Except I have one tiny pet peeve with (most of) them: they’re filled with things like ‘hold the door open for someone‘, ‘smile at a stranger’, ‘let someone in a hurry go ahead of you in line‘. I’m sorry. Let’s get real. These should be accepted as baseline standards for considerate social behavior, yes? Can we agree on that? Ok, thanks. While the cards in my calendar do range in effort from super easy to requiring a little more planning/thought, I hope you’ll find it a wonderful challenge that pushes you beyond the typical day-to-day pleasantries.
how to make your random acts of kindness advent calendar
- Download and print the free random acts of kindness advent calendar (see below).
- Cut on the black lines. Fold on the gray lines.
- Display in any manner you like. Above I used mini clothes pins to hang from an old frame. Below you see I used washi tape to adhere to the wall. You could also put the cards in envelopes and leave one under your child’s pillow each night to help get them more excited about the activity.
Note: There’s disagreement on whether an advent calendar should be a countdown to Christmas (going from 25 to 1) or a true ‘calendar’ matching the dates (going from 1 to 25). I designed this calendar to match December dates and tried to make the ‘bigger’ activities fall on a weekend when there would be more time. For what that’s worth.
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I know it’s such a crazy busy time of the year, but I promise the effort you put into this challenge will be incredibly rewarding. I hope you’ll be inspired to start this tradition of kindness with your family and make it a priority for this year (not just another thing you pin for later)!
