Advent Calendar Sandwich and Lunch

Celebrate the start of December with this fun Advent themed lunch for kids - complete with clever Advent calendar sandwich idea!

Today is the first day of advent, and Small Child was ridiculously excited about it! He leapt out of bed this morning and ran downstairs, desperate to open his advent calendar.  He was so excited he even forgot to check under his pillow to see if the tooth fairy had visited (he lost his second tooth yesterday). 

There was a lot of magic taking place in our house last night - not only did the tooth fairy visit, it was also the last night of Dinovember (our dinosaurs have been getting up to all sorts of antics this month, but most days I didn't get around to taking photos so I won't be sharing them on the blog this year - you can see what they got up to last year in these posts though; Dinovember part 1, part 2 and part 3) and added to all that our elf Christopher Pop-In-Kins arrived too!

All this excitement called for a special lunch, and the idea came to me over breakfast to make an advent calendar sandwich.  This was inspired by a fantastic Harry Potter themed lunch made by my bento blogging friend Karen from What's In Our Lunch Bags - Karen incorporated a cupboard door into a sandwich to represent the cupboard under the stairs, which I thought was just so clever (do go an have a look, it's brilliant!).  My version was slightly simpler - I used a small sharp knife to cut four doors into a piece of bread before using it as the top piece to a sandwich. 

The sandwich was filled with German sausage slices (not particularly healthy but a big favourite of Small Childs) and I cut some shapes from cheese using mini bento cutters to pop behind each 'window'.  I drew numbers on each door with an edible marker pen to finish it off.  In the picture below I pinned back one of the windows so you can see what it looked like when the doors were opened.

Here's the rest of the lunch, packed in our Yumbox Panino. I was running out of time after spending a little while working out the sandwich, so I kept it simple with a handful of green grapes and blueberries, topped with alphabet picks spelling out 'ADVENT' and some yellow pepper and cucumber slices, from which I cut little stars using a mini bento cutter. I filled the dip well with raisins, which I topped with a gingerbread man cupcake pick.  I ended up having to move the pick to top the veggies instead before shutting the lid because it was too big for the dip well.

I also threw a frozen yoghurt tube into his lunch bag (not shown).  Small Child went off to school happily with his advent lunch, I do hope he enjoyed it!

Items used to make this lunch:

   

Disclosure: This post contains some Amazon affiliate links; I may receive commission on items purchased through the links.

If you enjoyed this fun lunch idea, you might also like these festive themed lunches too:

Let it Snow Lunch

Reindeer Sandwich Lunch

Snowflake Sandwich Lunch

Easy Santa Sandwich Lunch

Or for more packed lunch inspiration, head over to the creative bento lunches section here on the Eats Amazing blog where you’ll find over 450 fun packed lunch ideas, enough to keep you going all the year around!

Grace