Advent Calendar

My daughter is telling me about a post on social media where someone asks the question,

“Which number do you open first on your advent calendar, 1 or 24?”

After spitting my coffee all over the table she says that 9% of all respondents do indeed open their advent calendars in reverse order.

In my childhood, this would have meant beginning the month with the birth of Christ and building up to a small picture of a candy stick.

It’s an understandable confusion in an increasingly secular world, where Advent calendars rarely have pictures but do contain chocolate, or coffee, or gin, or stickers, and string bracelets if you’ve been foolish enough to pay £600 for one made by Chanel.

When the children were small we bought a fabric advent calendar in the shape of a Christmas tree with 24 small pockets containing a variety of stitched gingerbread men, brightly coloured parcels, holly, mistletoe and so on that are hung onto the tree throughout December.

By the time they could count there was always an argument over who would hang the even numbers and who would hang the odd, the former being the chosen one to put the final trinket on top of the tree.

In the end, my wife wrote the years on a piece of paper and the name of the child whose turn it was to hang the first number.

We still refer to it on December 1st even though both children are now in their twenties.

At some stage, and I don’t remember when, a tub of chocolates was introduced to accompany the ritual of drawing the small curiosity from its felt pocket.

I believe we did it to mitigate the complaints about friends’ edible calendars but something was lost in its innocence all the same.

In my own childhood, we used to have a flimsy paper version that was almost always either a picture of the nativity or the three wise men following the star.

There was glitter, which would fall off into our breakfast cereal, and by around December 10th we had already opened the big window to number 24 to check the picture (always baby Jesus in a manger) before carefully closing the (double) doors to make it look as if it hadn’t been touched.

But what I really loved was an advent candle.

It offered less variety but the seasonal joy of turning the lights out during “Z Cars” or “The Generation Game” and burning the candle down past one of the numbers printed on the smooth wax really felt, well, Christmassy.

This year I bought one again for the first time in decades but candles apparently aren’t what they used to be and, having lit it on the first day of December, I went into the kitchen, made a cup of tea and emptied the dishwasher, and came back to find that it had already burned down to December 7th.

We laughed when my wife told us that, as children, she and her brother were given the same calendar every year to open.

“Didn’t you remember what all the pictures were?”

“No. We loved it.”

Of course they did because it’s just a moment of joy “on the way” and not designed to be a big-ticket destination, just like most of the experiences we have in our lives.