Advent calendars and precious moments
When capitalism gets something kind of right
Morning darklings,
I can't remember a year when I haven't had an Advent calendar. When I was a child, they were thin cardboard boxes with beautiful German illustrations on the front, filled with chocolates pressed into the shapes of toys and presents, hidden behind numbered perforated squares. As I got older, and we moved out of Germany, we found similar thin cardboard boxes with similar chocolate. It was the way of the Advent calendar. Or rather, the modern Advent calendar. That is, until people got creative. Then, we had hot cocoa and trail mixes, lip balms, earring studs.
I recently read an article on NPR about the history of Advent calendars. I knew where they came from at one point in my life. It was familiar, the roots in Germany and it being popularized Post World War II. But that knowledge long disappeared to movie quotes and how to thread a needle. It was a reminder that we have commercialized a tradition about marking the passage of days with one's family.
My mother sent me and the hubs Advent calendars. She always does. There's one for each cat, which comes with new toys to occupy them. As they bore so easily, it's lovely to see them get excited as we relax. There's a Nat Geo gemstone calendar. Each day I get a new stone that reminds me of both being a child and collecting rocks and being an adult and chiseling stone from the Earth only to crack it open and see the beauty that’s inside. And there's an Advent calendar that has 24 days of different tea bags. We have two of these!
This year, I bought an Advent calendar as well, where each day you make a small craft. On December 24, you have a small Santa's village. I have moved away from decorating for the holidays. I used to go all out, and now I find I want to decorate a tree and put a few plushies out, maybe string some extra lights or a garland along the wall. So this Santa's village is not meant to be a permanent fixture in our decor. I bought it so that the hubs and I would have something to do together daily that kept us in the holiday mood. The calendar is meant for children. So the pieces are large and take only moments to put together.
But we’ve made opening the calendars into something more.
We turn lofi on the TV, make a pot of tea with the current day’s tea bag, give the Smalls a toy, open the gemstone calendar and read about the stone, and chat about something or nothing or just sit in the quiet while we hook four to six pieces of decorated thin press board together to create a small house. It's a pause in a busy day.
It hadn't really occurred to me that I was blending our current desire (as a society) to buy and own and spend with the original intent behind the tradition.
Before we had finished our first pot of tea on December 1, I looked at the hubs and said, “I want to do something like this every day.” Of course I didn't mean we needed calendars or to have something or do something new every day. I just thought, we should take a pause every day together and do something sweet.
Tea will probably be involved, because that's just who we are. Beyond that, I'm not sure. Maybe we'll take turns deciding. January and February can be my months, and he could take March and April, and so on. Or maybe one of the days will be us coming up with ideas.
I see more tiny crafts and new card games and making the ordinary extraordinary.
There is just so much value in a Little moment together. And why must we wait for December to make that happen? Why must we buy premade packaged calendars to make that happen? We can a lot of this all by ourselves.
question of the week
Do you buy Advent calendars?
Until next time, harness the Little darknesses and embrace the Little things.
