One of the most popular holiday traditions is the daily unveiling of an Advent Calendar. Every year, Advent Calendars seem to get more and more popular. Today, companies make all sorts of Advent Calendars. You have your traditional paper ones, your beauty ones, your candy ones, and even some have been made for socks. But where did the tradition come from?

The term Advent comes from the Latin origin which means coming. Advent is the period of four weeks before Christmas. The term "coming" is used to signify the birth of Jesus. Advent Calendars began in the 19th century as a way to countdown to Christmas. The first forms of these calendars were started in Germany by making 24 tallies on a door and wiping one off each day. Wow! Haven't we come a long way since then?

When paper calendars started to become a trend in the 1900s, the traditional Advent Calendar we know of today became the standard. Each calendar is made with 25 different slots, or doors, and behind each door is a holiday themed scene. Over time, Advent Calendars have evolved and now include prizes behind the doors.

Advent Calendars have come a long way since they were first introduced! Here are some pretty cool Advent Calendars that are currently available.

Traditional Advent Calendars

Peanuts Advent Calendar. Each box reveals a holiday antic and features all your favorite Peanuts characters.

Sweet Christmas Advent Calendar. This holiday sweet treat themed Advent Calendar has all sorts of Christmas characters and activities hidden behind each slot.

Twinkle and Shine Advent Calendar. If you want to learn more about holiday traditions from all around the world, this advent calendar teaches you a fun fact each day!

Beauty Advent Calendars

The Body Shop's 24 Days of the Enchanted Advent Calendar. Inside you will find 24 beauty favorites from The Body Shop that will revive and re-energize your body and mind.

Ciaté London Mini Mani Month Nail Set. This comes with 20 mini nail polishes, one full-size polish, a mini treatment, a mini top coat, and nail transfers.

Nyx's Sugar Trip 24 Days Of Beauty Advent Calendar. This beauty advent calendar is filled with 24 different makeup products including lipsticks, eye shadow and highlighters.

Candy Advent Calendars

Lindt Bear Advent Calendar. Who doesn't love some Lindt chocolate?

Reese's Countdown Christmas Advent Calendar. You really can't go wrong with a Reese's candy every day.

Godiva's 2018 Advent Calendar. By far one of the most popular chocolate Advent Calendar.

It may be nine days into December, but that doesn't mean it's too late to get in on the fun of an Advent Calendar. I'm definitely thinking of buying one! What about you, do you have an Advent Calendar? Until tomorrow.

The best part of this time of the year is getting to indulge in all of the holiday movies out there. Whether that is watching the classics movies or specials or even watching original movies made specifically for this time of the year. One TV station is known for their holidays movies, the Hallmark channel.

A Hallmark Christmas Movie is not critically acclaimed in any way whatsoever. Instead, it's more of a feel good romantic comedy with a holiday theme. If you've never seen a Hallmark Christmas Movie, don't worry each movie is pretty much the same. They all follow the same generic plot line. I'm going to break down the plot of what (almost) every Hallmark movie follows. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Hallmark Christmas Movie Formula.

Now the first thing you need to know about what makes a Hallmark Christmas Movie a Hallmark Christmas Movie is the casting. The casting is crucial! Now you won't find an A List actor to star in the film. Normally it's a D List star or someone you've never heard of before. Think of people you've either seen on Dancing With The Stars or who you expect to make an appearance in the near future. Hallmark always has a go to star for each movie, I refer to them as their ringers. Stars like Candace Cameron Bure, Lacey Chabert, Lori Laughlin and Danica McKellar are basically Hallmark royalty. There are other actors and actress but those four are the faces of Hallmark and have starred in a majority of the movies. Now for the rest of the cast, you have the love interest, the family members, friends, co-workers, and towns people. Now most of these are played by nobodies as well. But sometimes, the love interest may be notable but most of the time he's just a pretty face.

Now that we have the cast all picked out, let's get to the basics of the plot. The story always takes place during, you guessed it, Christmas time. Literally the week of or the week before. The main character is typically a big city girl with some sort of cut throat career, sometimes you'll have a writer, a business woman, a doctor or veterinarian, or some other cliche profession. But what the real takeaway from her profession is that she's typically in line for a big promotion. But first, she has to relocate to a small town to help the struggling town and prove she's worthy of the promotion.

Now while she's struggling to get adjusted to small town life she meets her love interest by some chance of fate. Whether that's by bumping into them accidentally or having some sort of argument, she has no idea this is who she's supposed to fall in love with. Things will typically start off rocky, since they're so different. Small town boy and big city girl never works right? WRONG! They end up spending more and more time together, because (you guessed it) he's the person she's supposed to help while she's in the small town.

Things start to look up after that chance encounter, he helps her get adjusted and she helps him with the business. While they're working together, they also start to form a friendship and do things together outside of work, You'll find them participating in cliche Christmas activities, like baking cookies, building a snowman, ice skating, decorating the Christmas tree, etc, etc, etc. You get the point right?

Their connection starts to grow and slowly but surely they're falling in love. The main character is finally used to small town life and slowly starts to forget about her old life. But wait! Her boss calls, and offers her the promotion, she's headed back to her old life. She tells her love interest and they're both sad realizing things would have never worked anyways. When she's finally back in the city and has everything she thought she wanted, she has an epiphany. She leaves her promotion to go back to the small town realizing all she ever needed was true love. So she makes it back to the small town just in time to celebrate Christmas and participate in some local tradition. She runs back to her love interest tells him everything she just realized, they kiss, then it starts snowing. BAM the movie is over and the credits roll.

There you have it, now you know the plot of every Hallmark Christmas Movie ever made and every movie to come. That's two hours of your life you just got back, and yes they are all two hours long including commercials. Now not to trash Hallmark, their movies are really enjoyable. Predicabale and cliched? Yes. But still enjoyable! Sometimes all you want to do is watch a cheesy holiday movie during this time of the year.

In fact, someone actually created a Hallmark Christmas Movie drinking game. The game itself follows the Hallmark Christmas Movie Formula, which goes to show just how predictable they are. I know I'll be participating in this game this year! Adding fun elements like the drinking game or trying to predict the plot based on the title really shows what a Hallmark Christmas Movie is supposed to be about, fun times and celebrating with your friends and family.

This year, I've already watched a fair share of Hallmark movies and I'm not ashamed at all. In fact, I can't wait to catch some of the new ones I've missed out on this year like The Christmas Train and Christmas in Evergreen. Also be on the lookout for some other new Hallmark Christmas movies that will premiere this month, there are still seven new ones left to air!

There are just about two weeks left until Christmas, so what are you waiting for? Let's get to watching!

Until tomorrow.

Last night, country music star Kelsea Ballerini performed in Downtown LA at the Wiltern for a sold out crowd. For those of you who do not listen to country music or have been living under a rock, Kelsea Ballerini is the newest and next big thing in country music. Think of her as a combination of Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift. In fact she was recently nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammys.

The show was brought to you by Go Country 105, LA's hottest country music station. Their street team was at the venue passing out all kinds of swag like chapstick and mints.

The opening act was Australian country music singer Morgan Evans, who is actually Ballerini's boyfriend. His style of music is very similar to another Australian country star, you might know him, the one and only Keith Urban. Charming and talented, it's easy to see why Ballerini is dating him and picked him to open for her in Los Angeles. In fact, he said his "one job was to get everyone ready for Kelsea," which he definitely did.

Once it hit 9:00 pm, the lights dimmed and Ballerini's name was lit up on the backdrop after an epic light show that certainly hyped up the crowd. She came out in an adorable sparkly pink and blue dress (or romper, it was hard to tell) and started the show with her latest hit, "Yeah Boy," which got everyone off their feet. That wasn't the only feel good song you could dance to. In fact most of the show was filled with songs that did just that. Especially songs like "Square Pegs," "Dibs," and "XO."

It was not all one big dance party, Ballerini slowed it down a couple times to sing some of her ballads, like her big hit "Peter Pan" and "Stilettos" a song off her debut album. Besides singing some of her biggest hits and the other songs off her album, she also sang a couple of new songs from the newest album that she has already started working on. Also what's a concert without a couple of cover songs? Ballerini covered two of her favorite songs: one country song and one pop song. She sang David Allan Coe's "Tennessee Whiskey" and Adele's "Send My Love (To Your New Lover), absolutely beautifully.

Ballerini ended the show with an encore that she performed within the audience. She was set up on the side of the pit filled with her biggest fans who kept trying to get a selfie with the star. This moment captured what Ballerini wants all her shows to be like, a great time for all her fans and friends.

Last night's stop in Los Angeles was the seventh stop on Ballerini's The First Time Tour. And yes you guessed it, this was her first ever headlining tour. She just finished performing shows on the East Coast and is now headed to Las Vegas and Texas to wrap up her tour. If you're in the area, check out her show, you won't regret it! And if you missed her this time, she should be back with another tour sometime in the future!

Until tomorrow.

The best part of Christmas, is the tree and the decorating of the tree. In my family, we always decorated our tree with a specific theme. And when you have a specific theme, it can be hard to find ornaments that match the theme. Some colors are impossible to find! And other times, you may just want some ornaments in a specific color.

Well this year my mom wanted to have an Ireland themed tree, and she could not find any orange ornaments. So we decided to make them, and I came up with a pretty clever idea on how to make them. Instead of painting these plain glass ornaments, like my mom thought of doing, I thought about taking the top of the ornaments off and putting the paint inside. And that ended up working pretty well! So here's what you'll need to do.

First you'll need to get clear glass ornaments. Michael's sells them, and I recently just got a pack to make my own ornaments for my tree and one six pack was only $2. Thank goodness for 50% off Christmas items! Then you'll also need paint, any colors you want! Personally I like the Craft Smart acrylic paint, which I think works best.

You really do not need much to make these ornaments. But if you want to get fancy, try adding some glitter or even get some paint pens to design them. Be creative! But for now, let's focus on getting this clear ornaments painted!

So first you're going to want to take off the top of the ornament (duh). Then add paint to the inside, add as much as you think you will need to cover the entire ornament. At first I wasn't adding enough and I had to keep adding more. But if you add more at one time it is easier to spread the paint.

Once the paint is spread throughout the ornament fully, set it aside to dry. I say leave them out to dry for maybe a day? The first time I tried this, I didn't let the ornaments dry long enough. Once they were put on the tree, all the paint ran down to the bottom and created a giant puddle. So let them dry, especially if you used a lot of paint.

I put my ornaments back in the box to dry and I left the caps off. The first time I put the caps back on. But this time I tried letting them dry with them off and they appear to be drying a lot quicker!

So there you have it! There are my basic colored ornaments! I think they turned out pretty well and so I wanted to share this little trick and technique. It could be a fun crafting activity with your family before you decorate the tree! Plus, you just made your own unique ornaments! No one else will have ones like this! So that makes them pretty special!!

Let me know if you try this DIY out! I'd love to see and hear how they turned out! Tweet or Instagram a picture of them and mention me or tag me: @heykaitlinmary, I'd love to see them! Until tomorrow.

Here is Day 9 of my 30 day blog challenge! Today's topic: what's in my bag? And I thought it would be fun to do this one as a vlog. So here it is!

Thanks for watching and until next time!