How to make your own unique dinosaur Advent wreath

Germany has the best Christmas traditions.

So good, that other countries have adopted many of them: Christmas trees, Advent calendars, Christmas markets, nutcrackers and gingerbread.

We’ve adopted one of our favourite German Christmas traditions. But we dino-fied it. Of course.

Our unique dinosaur Advent wreath is simple and fun and will help your little dinosaur fan count down the weeks until Christmas. Here’s how you do it.

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What is Advent?

Advent is the start of the Christmas season.

Traditionally, it is a 40-day fast leading up to Christmas Eve. The name comes from the Latin term adventus, which means “coming or arrival” and it is the period leading up to the coming or birth of Jesus Christ.

What are Advent wreaths?

Advent wreaths, also known as Advent crowns, are a Christian tradition that started in Hamburg, Germany. They have four candles, sometimes with a (white) Christ candle in the middle. One candle is lit each of the four Sundays immediately before Christmas so that all candles are lit by Christmas.

Advent wreaths are traditionally round to represent God’s love. They are normally made of evergreen leaves for eternal life.

More modern wreaths can be any shape and have Christmas-themed decorations, flowers, spices or just general winter decorations.

Ours has Christmas dinosaurs.

Pssst… don’t confuse our Advent wreath with our dinosaur Advent calendar.

What makes our dinosaur Advent wreath special?

Our dinosaur Advent wreath is free-form. There is no wreath – no greenery in sight. We’ve put our Advent dinosaurs and the candles on a round, green cake stand, but only because we already had one.

For a more traditional wreath, attach the Christmas dinosaurs to an evergreen wreath with some florist’s wire and use candle fixers for the candles.

Our dinosaur Advent wreath has four candles and four Christmas dinosaurs (AKA Advent dinosaurs). Each candle is numbered. Our numbers are metal pins, but you could use a wax pen to write on numbers. The ever-practical Daddysaurus wishes we didn’t add the numbers as it makes it harder to burn the candles to keep them all around the same height.

Some people like to have different coloured candles: three purple candles for the first 3 Sundays of Advent and a pink candle for the last Sunday before Christmas. You can also use candles of different heights.

Did I mention that our dinosaur Advent wreath has Christmas dinosaurs?

Instead of a more traditional Advent wreath, we have four loosely placed candles and four Advent dinosaurs trying to decorate a Christmas tree.

They’re very cute and fun and definitely not boring. But I’m biased.

What do you need to make your own dinosaur Advent wreath?

You only need a few things to make your own dinosaur Advent wreath.

• Four candles – one for each Sunday of Advent.
• Four dinosaurs – one for each Sunday of Advent, though you’re welcome to use more or fewer. You may already have some at home that would be perfect. Spray painting is optional, so you don’t have to ruin your little dinosaur lover’s favourite dinosaurs to make your own dinosaur Advent wreath. You don’t want the dinosaurs to be too small or too big – 15 – 20 cm is a good size for a Christmas dinosaur.
• Small ornaments, ribbons, tinsel and whatever else you can rustle up from your craft and Christmas supplies or find at your favourite dollar store. The size must be appropriate for your Christmas dinosaurs.

Optional additions

• Spray paint – our LDA and I discussed whether or not to paint our Advent dinosaurs at length, before finally deciding we would. We purchased some dinosaurs for craft projects; if they had been some of her favourite toy dinosaurs, spraypainting would have been out of the question. Check your spray paint and try and get one with a primer in it or is designed for plastic. We used this one, which we already had on hand from another project.
• A cake stand, tray or plate to corral the candles and Advent dinosaurs.
• Numbers for the candles: if you don’t share Daddysaurus’ opinion, you can add some numbers to your candles. Write them on a nice piece of card and attach them with a drawing pin, for example.
• Some miniature Christmas trees. We got ours from IKEA, but the trees in this set are similar. These rainbow ones could be cute.
• Some gifts. You might be lucky enough to have some little gift box ornaments. We made our own. The trick is to find some small boxes – which is not always easy – who uses matchsticks anymore? Raisin boxes work well. We ended up using some of the ‘products’ from a toy shopping basket from Aldi and just wrapped them with bright paper.

What we used for our Advent dinosaurs

Apart from the obvious Advent dinosaurs and candles, we used the following things to ‘decorate’ our dinosaur advent wreath (most of which we already owned):

• mini pine trees
• gold sequin ribbon
• mini baubles, something like these ones (our have a 2.5mm diameter)
• mini Santa hats
• mini string lights (fake, of course)
• gold string
• mini bells
• some tinsel – we ripped the stars off some tinsel use as the star on the top of our mini Christmas tree

How to make your dinosaur Advent wreath

I was going to make a special how-to card but it didn’t make sense as so much of it depends on what dinosaurs you have chosen to become your Advent dinosaurs and what ornaments, decorations and other craft supplies you find. Yes, this is another craft that calls on you to raid your craft box!

Simply set out your candles (with or without numbers), find your dinosaurs (with or without spray painting them) and play around with the things you found to see what your Christmas dinosaurs can get up to.

As our biggest dinosaur, our Brachiosaurus was our tree carrier while our Stegosaurus carried our presents. T-Rex got all tangled in the tree lights. We ran out of inspiration when we got to the Triceratops. She’s carrying ornaments – three of course.

What if you don’t want a dinosaur Advent wreath?

There’s nothing to say you have to make these dinosaurs into a dinosaur Advent wreath. In fact, our LDA is so in love with our dinosaurs she wants to use them as regular Christmas decorations too. That’s partly why we decided to be generic when designing our dinosaurs and what they are doing.

Make your own unique dinosaur Advent wreath

Dino-fy the festive season and Advent by morphing your normal Advent wreath in to a dinosaur Advent wreath with Advent dinosaurs!

You can easily make one with your little dinosaur fan and use it to count down the time until Christmas. So dig into your craft supplies and Christmas ornaments and get creative!

By the way, Germans entrepreneurs have even worked out how to dino-fy another Christmas tradition: Christmas markets.

What Christmas traditions have you dino-fied?

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