Books for Advent

As the holidays are approaching, thoughts of how to make the season magical start to take hold. There is little I like more than reading a book next to a beautiful Christmas tree with sparkling white lights. (Well, okay, I do love reading next to a pool or on a beach a bit more, but I digress!) We don’t have children, but both have the heart and eyes of a child during December and this led to a tradition of gifting each other an advent that we open together every day. This year’s advent consists of BOOKS! I thought I’d share how we went about building an adult book advent.

Building the List

If you are planning to build a book advent, it’s likely for someone who loves to read and that means they probably has a few shelves of books. What about the long list of novels they have already read? How do you figure out what books to include that will be fresh, of interest, and don’t break the bank.

Our solution: Pinterest…create a Secret Board shared with only the participants. Each person then uploads links to 25-35 potential options.

Now, there are a few other guidelines:

• Backlist books are your friend. The older the book, the easier to find a used copy at a discount price.
• Set a budget. We try to tap out at $5/book, but might be guilty of finding a $1 copy for one book and a $9 copy for another.
• Don’t be a book snob. Typically we both prefer trade paperback or hardcover. However, mass market is a great way to get a less expensive copy of a novel. A bonus of mass market for me is that I feel far less guilty taking those to the pool and beach in case of a water splash.
• Reading adjacent is an option. Decide whether bookmarks, book lights, etc are acceptable for a few advent days. 

Where to Buy

While I’m a big advocate of local independent bookstores, my shops don’t usually have deep discount sales or a used section. I also like to buy directly from first-hand shops to give those royalties to authors, whenever possible. With all of that said, 48 full-price books for our household isn’t in our budget. We get creative…

• Thriftbooks.com: This is my favorite online shop. They do a great job of curating their used books section. You can search for the title and see every iteration they have of the book with a rating on the quality of the physical product. Sometimes you find a trade paperback for a great price and they have a lot of mass market paperbacks, too. Shipping is typically cheap (or free) if you are ordering enough and they process orders at a pretty fast pace. 
• Half-Price Books: We are lucky enough to have two of these brick and mortar shops where I live, but they also have an online presence. The name says it all, but you can often get some larger discounts than half off. Bonus if you have some books to sell back to them! Then you can use that cash/store credit to purchase advent books.
• Libraries: While we all typically think of libraries as a borrow and return program, my local library has a books for purchase area that is open every day that the library is. Last time I checked, they are $1/book. If you have an advent participant with a wider taste in books, this might be an option for you. 
• Garage Sales / Antique Stores / Little Free Libraries: This is an excellent option if you shop throughout the year and have a more open to any books recipient. If I had planned earlier this year, I could have squirreled away some great books from my little neighborhood free library. 

Wrapping

Now that you have the books in hand, you get to decide if each day is a grab bag of sorts or if you want to designate days for each gift. We usually deploy a mixture of these two approaches. For example, if there is a holiday-themed novel, maybe you want to give that on day 1 so the recipient can enjoy the novel in the lead up to Christmas. Maybe there is a hard-to-find novel that you want to be a big surprise so you save that one for Christmas Eve.

One year my husband included a little tree of numbers that contained a piece of candy or tea to go along with my book advent. 

Next up, wrapping all those books. It’s a great opportunity to use up all that leftover wrapping paper at the ends of the roll! From there, it’s unwrapping and enjoying. Happy reading!