DIY Birthday Countdown Calendar

Birthday coming up? Celebrate all month long with a DIY Birthday Countdown Calendar!

A flip of the calendar and suddenly it’s birthday month. Not for me this time, but for my twins. I don’t do a big thing every year, in fact last year I was sort of on a Caribbean cruise over their birthday. But this year is a pretty monumental birthday and I thought it deserved some extra celebrating.

Oldest Twin is obsessed with cacti and points them out wherever we go. So ‘I make birthdays look sharp’ is our theme for the month. (I’ll be sharing more from their Cactus theme birthday party soon!)

Our birthday countdown calendar starts with some baby food jars. I haven’t had a baby for awhile, but baby food jars are so handy! And this has turned into one of my favorite baby food jar crafts. So I collected some jars from friends, cleaned them out, removed the labels, and was ready to start.

Birthday Countdown Calendar

• Empty baby food jars
• Cookie sheet
• Spray Paint
• Hot glue gun and glue sticks
• Tissue paper
• Scissors
• Toys or candy that fit in jars
• Rubber bands
• Stickers

Green seemed like the obvious choice for my cactus themed birthday countdown calendar. I spray painted the cookie sheet and jars separately, not worrying about painting the bottom of the jars. When they were dry I hot glued the jars to the cookie sheet.   

Fill the jars with candy, trinkets, or even some cash.

I wanted this to be sort of a punch calendar, so instead of using the baby food jar lids for the craft, I used tissue paper. I picked a purple that looked cactus-y and cut out squares of tissue paper.

Place the tissue paper squares over the jar lids and secure with some rubber bands. And because this is a cactus theme I added cactus stickers to the top of each of my jars. If you want you could add numbers to the tops as well.

The kids get to open one jar each day leading up to their birthday!

While I made this for a birthday countdown I’m realizing how easy and fun it would be to make a jar countdown calendar for the holidays, or even counting down to a vacation!