Advent calendars

I can’t remember when Advent calendars became part of our family’s end-of-the-year traditions, but it must be almost 20 years now, ideal especially for young kids, so much so that the tradition has been extended, starting two years ago, to grandchildren.

The calendars actually started among the Lutherans in Germany, but have since spread throughout the world, mainly in Western countries. It’s a deceptively simple calendar, looking like a poster with a Christmas scene.

When you look closely at the poster, you find it has little “doors” or “windows,” numbered one to 25. Given its name, you’ve probably guessed how it’s used. Most of you probably know the Christmas carol “12 Days of Christmas.” Well, the Advent calendar celebrates 25 days of Christmas, corresponding to Advent, the beginning of the Christian liturgical year, leading to Christmas Day, each day involving a new gift. The season’s mood is one of anticipation and hope, a theme that has become more and more relevant in our turbulent times, including wars fought in the name of religion.

The gifts change each day and should be small enough to insert into the calendar. Chocolates are a natural choice, with one chocolate per day. I checked Lazada and was shocked at the number of variations now for the gifts, with different kinds of miniature toys (cars, planes), all the way up to stuff for meditation. Still, New Age options range from gemstones and “healing” crystals to miniature bottles of alcoholic beverages (for which you’ll presumably need the crystals afterward). Clearly, these calendars are not just for little kids but also for the big ones now.

This year, Advent calendars got me thinking a bit more. There’s the transition, not just liturgical but of generations. I wonder if the tradition will continue with my grandchildren’s children. Will it take on new formats? I read about how the calendar has been made life-sized by department stores and parks, amplifying the excitement of the doors and gifts.

I’ve wondered, too, about why the calendars haven’t become more popular in our Christmas-crazy Philippines. I can imagine the calendars’ illustrations and formats integrating our belen (nativity tableaux), livened up by chorale performances.

Commercialism has focused Christmas on gifts, but I like the way the Advent calendar gives an opportunity to have more meaningful Christmas activities every day for most of December, as elders explain the pictures. The gifts are a bonus, certainly not limited to chocolates, which are sweetened literally. It’s also supposed to teach patience—you open only one each day, corresponding to the number on the window/door.

The “only one a day” isn’t that easy to enforce. There was a year when my son was still a toddler, and he finished nearly the entire Advent’s rations of chocolate in two sittings! You might want to have a warning on the package, “Keep out of reach of children,” which would be an irony because kids were probably the original targets.

Lazada also offered DIY (do-it-yourself) kits for creating your Advent calendar, consisting of 24 small, numbered boxes, which you put together, perhaps with different small gift items. The cheap gemstones being offered did get me thinking that maybe richer gift-givers might arrange to give 24 expensive items, real gems, for example.

And, yes, the Advent calendar will need some ingenuity if you’re packing in clothes. Go for the accessories, which reflect the season’s messages: we need patience, and an eye for the stuff that helps us toward dreams, like belts to keep us looking fit(ter) and trim(mer).

Books are another challenge for packing into an Advent calendar, unless it’s a link to a PDF book. (Which reminds me, you can compile a playlist(s) of songs, with links, to prepare that special significant other for the gift of gifts.) USBs fit perfectly into the days on the calendar.

See Also

Wishful thinking

Patience, patience. For children, the advice to be patient is straightforward: if you finish all the chocolates before Christmas, you’ll have to wait until December 2026 for another Advent calendar. For adults, it would be more of a general gift message to accompany Advent’s wishes and promises: many of the things we hope and aspire to will need patience over time, maybe even years. The gifts most worth waiting for will need the most patience, from that diploma to the sweet yes to a proposal, and, yes, an end to our country’s long ordeal with corruption.

We would have to remind ourselves that requited patience will have to be stepwise; an end to corruption, for example, will not happen without justice rendered, especially to the big crooks, including the bosses in syndicates and the government.

This year’s Advent challenges us, patience-wise.

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michael.tan@inquirer.net