As there's less than a week before the start of Advent, we thought we'd quickly offer a classic project that your kids can enjoy all the way until Christmas.

Here are our directions for an advent calendar made of matchboxes.

1) Collect or buy matchboxes of the same size.

You’ll need 25.

2) Empty out the matches (careful what you do with them — we transferred our matches to our empty matchbox collection and with the rest we were a little extra careful and soaked them in water overnight before we threw them out). (you could cut off the igniting end and use the sticks for another project)

3) Wrap the boxes with paper — you can use white or a solid coloured paper onto which your kids can colour, paint or stick whatever they’d like, or you can use an already patterned paper.

4) You or your kids can write or paint numbers 1 through 25 on one end of your boxes. It’s not the end of the world if your drawers open in different directions. You could tape little pull tabs on each drawer if you’re ambitious.

5) Stack them as per the picture, mixing the numbers as you like, putting 25 at the top or in the middle if you’d prefer. (Ours goes in order 1, 2, 3 ... but it would be more fun to mix up the numbers, so the kids have to search for their day). (Obviously, you can move the drawers without have to rearrange the boxes themselves.)

6) Adhere boxes together (starting at the bottom, of course) with glue or double-sided tape. We found double-sided tape the easiest.

7) Decorate any which way you like. Ours is a little minimal. Your kids would probably prefer more bits and pieces — paint, stars, collage — whatever they like as long as they don’t cover the doors or make it too fragile or breakable.

8) When your kids are asleep, fill the drawers with whatever surprises you like — little toys, wrapped candies, a note from Santa ...