Gift guide
Printable Advent calendar for families
A printable calendar costs some paper and ink and arrives the moment you download it. The hard part is keeping a family interested past the third of December. Here is how to set one up so that it lasts all the way to the 24th.
When does Advent start in 2026?
Advent begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, which this year is 29 November 2026. Most calendars do not follow that date exactly. As Wikipedia’s article on Advent calendars explains, because the first Sunday of Advent moves about, “many reusable Advent calendars made of paper or wood begin on December 1. Others start from the First Sunday of Advent.”
For a printable calendar, 1 to 24 December is the simplest choice: the same 24 days every year (in 2026 the 1st is a Tuesday). That makes the weekend of 28 and 29 November a good time to print the first week and find somewhere to hang it.
Where the paper Advent calendar came from
Counting down to Christmas on paper is older than the chocolate version. The German Wikipedia article on the Adventskalender describes early home versions, among them 24 chalk lines on a wall or door, with the children allowed to wipe one away each day. In 1903 the Munich publisher Gerhard Lang brought out a printed calendar called Im Lande des Christkinds: one sheet of 24 pictures to cut out and one sheet of 24 fields to stick them on, one a day. Calendars with little windows to open spread after 1920.
A printable puzzle calendar sits closer to Lang’s cut-and-stick sheet than to a box of chocolates: something to do each day, rather than something to eat.
Sources: Wikipedia, “Advent calendar”; Wikipedia (German), “Adventskalender”, read in September 2026.
Six ways to make a printable calendar work at home
01
Print a week at a time
A stack of 24 pages on the kitchen counter is an invitation to skip ahead. Print days 1 to 7, then the next week on the following weekend. Black-and-white printing is fine for most puzzle calendars, and it keeps the ink cartridge alive until Christmas.
02
Give it a fixed place
Peg the week’s pages to a string across a doorway, or keep them on a clipboard by the breakfast table. A calendar that lives in a drawer gets forgotten by day four.
03
Match the puzzle to the person
Mixed ages are the usual problem. Let older children solve alone and younger ones work with a grown-up reading the clues aloud, or take turns being the day’s “puzzle captain” who holds the pen.
04
Keep the answers somewhere else
If the calendar has an answer key, print it separately and keep it in a grown-up’s bag or behind the fridge magnet nobody moves. Checking tomorrow’s answer is the fastest way to ruin a countdown.
05
Pick the same moment every day
After breakfast, after school, or just before bed. The puzzle matters less than the habit of sitting down together for ten minutes in a busy month.
06
Make the weekend puzzles a family event
On Saturdays and Sundays there is usually more time. Solve those days together at the table, with a hot drink and no rush, and let the youngest fill in the last answer.
What is in our printable Advent calendar
We make one, so here are the plain facts about it. It is a single download from our Etsy shop with 24 puzzles, one for each day from 1 to 24 December, in six kinds: crossword, word search, sudoku, maze, secret message (a letter-swap code) and word scramble, and never the same kind two days running.
It starts gently, with a 4x4 sudoku and a small maze, and builds up to a 9x9 sudoku and a 19x19 maze by the 24th. It suits families with children from about nine, and grown-ups who like a daily puzzle; younger children can join in with a grown-up. You get two PDF files, one for A4 and one for US Letter, with a cover of numbered doors and an answer key at the back.
Every puzzle is checked by our own software before the file is made: each sudoku has exactly one solution and each maze exactly one route. The word lists, crossword clues and secret-message sayings were written with the help of an AI writing tool, and then checked by that same software.
Printable Advent calendar
24 puzzles, ready to print tonight
An instant download on Etsy: print it at home in A4 or US Letter and open one puzzle a day from 1 December.
Price incl. VAT shown on Etsy · instant download · nothing is posted.