My sibling will have to forgive me for starting the holiday season before their birthday. They were born on December 4, and so we never put out any Christmas decorations before their day. Always after. The Christmas tree wouldn’t go up until after December 17 (my uncle’s birthday) and would come down on January 2 (my grandmother’s birthday). I don’t have a tree at home, except for my artificial Peanuts one. It came with Linus’ blanket. And I won’t be home on January 2, so my decorations will be up after the prescribed day. Again, apologies to all of my relatives, both living and dead, whose birthdays I am besmirching.
It is December 1, and I was successful in finishing NaNoWriMo, so I put up my Christmas decorations. Not the weird mini quilt thing that I don’t have a place for, and I left the collection of tree ornaments I’ve been slowly amassing in my bin, since I won’t have a tree. But when I do, I’ll be ready. I hung the snowman door hanger on my bedroom doorknob, and like we did in my parents’ house, I will forget it’s there and only notice it again in February, before I put it away. I made it in Brownies, when I was 7 or 8. It says “Alison’s Room” on it. You can see where I got a blob of paint on the S.
I love Christmas. My DVDs are lined up, ready to watch my favourite movies. (I’m a millennial, meaning I don’t entirely trust streaming platforms and I don’t have cable, so I bought all of my favourite movies on DVD so I would always have them.) I have a stack of Christmas ghost stories to read, some old (I love A Christmas Carol), and some collections new to me this year. I have three Christmas dresses which I will wear to work a lot this month, and I even sourced my Christmas headband early this year, since Shoppers had the Joe Fresh Christmas accessory line out in the middle of October and I was not getting caught out. I hate starting Christmas too early, but I also hate missing out on an addition to my Christmas collection that I may really want.
And I put out my advent calendars, waiting for this morning. I have two this year: the tea one from the lovely World Tea House, which my partner picked up (and then suggested he might keep - no), and the Lego City one. My partner and I have been doing the Lego Advent calendars for a number of years, since we discovered them and realized we could just get them if we wanted them, because we are adults. Except for 2020, where planning something as simple as getting an advent calendar felt too precarious. They are delightful - you get to build a tiny Lego thing every day and it makes a whole scene! Glorious.
I love a good advent calendar. Last year, I had a Lego one and the Diamine Inkvent one (so much ink). Other years have involved a Kinder calendar, or a Lindt one. My partner picked up the Babybel cheese one this year. There are jam ones and book ones and beer ones and coffee ones. If you want an advent calendar to contain something, it probably exists.
This is one of the few things in the continued push to turn Christmas into the peak of the consumerist year. It’s not enough to have major sales events on either side of the holiday, which we use to start the frenzy, but you need to give yourself a small gift of some kind everyday in order to count down to Christmas. I love a good countdown, so naturally, I love advent calendars.
I also love advent calendars because I never had them as a child. I don’t know why this is - possibly my parents thought we didn’t need to eat cheap chocolates every day in December, and fair play on that. Advent calendars in the 90s and 2000s were not so creative and widespread as they are now. In my later teens, we had some, and I remember one year as a kid, my mom saw Toronto Maple Leafs ones so she bought those. For Christmas another year, my aunt gave us a set of advent stories - a set with 25 Christmas stories to read, all focused around the season, drawing on traditional stories and fables. The 25th book was the Gospel of Luke, illustrated, I believe. I read them every year until I had them all memorized, and then quit for a while in order to make them new again.
We did, however, have an advent wreath.
I was raised as a Catholic. A church-going, altar-serving, rosary-owning Catholic. I had my own bible (I think my mom kept it). There’s a cross in my parents’ living room with a palm from Palm Sunday tucked into it. I got my very own nativity set for Christmas when I was 8? 9? and it’s on my TV stand right now. I would not consider my family especially religious, but let’s put it this way: I very much understood every Catholic reference in Derry Girls. I do not practice now and haven’t in at least 15 years, but I’m definitely a cultural Catholic. I know my psalms, I know my prayers, and I know my advent wreaths. My mom taught catechism for many years, and had a wreath for her class, but we also had one at home, as part of our Christmas decorations. First with the older style candles, the three purple and a pink, and later, with white candles, which was more in fashion.
I used to count down to Christmas with the Sundays of Advent. In my child mind, it felt like Christmas would come faster if I was only counting four instead of 24. I love Christmas, and I always couldn’t wait until we were in the thick of it. This is still true to this day, but I interact with the season from a cultural standpoint, and less a religious one - though I was never particularly devoted or committed to any beliefs, even as a very young child. I knew pretty early one religion was not for me, and even after years of practicing it, spending time studying it in university, and continuing to read about religion. But even though I don’t practice in the way I did as a child, there is definitely the echo of it running through. Would I celebrate Christmas if I didn’t feel some connection with it? Probably not.
I genuinely can’t wait to open my calendars tomorrow and kick off the official start to my favourite holiday season. It’s spiralled out of control, with the push to buy, the over-the-top decorations, the pressure to have the perfect holiday. The music everywhere. The overwhelming, all-consuming presence of this holiday. The way we’ve enshrined it into the calendar and like to pretend it’s secular (it’s not). But I still love it. I’m going to bask in my tea and my Lego and the lights hung in my window, and listen to Christmas music (which includes a lot of hymns because the girl can walk out of the church, but it takes a lot longer to let it all go), read spooky Christmas stories, and whip up batches of caramels. I am ready to begin advent, in the way I observe it as an adult, with lines back to the ways I counted down as a child.
Lovely post, Alison! It's made me think about my own advent calendars of the past - I pre-date the advent (LOL!) of the chocolate calendar, and my brother and I always adored opening the big envelopes that my grandparents would send us at the very end of November each year - each envelope would contain a beautiful traditional card-with-windows advent calendar with a gorgeous scene of something like children ice skating on a frozen lake with a Christmas tree in the background, or a wintry scene in a forest with deer and owls. We'd each be given a different one. The excitement was amazing, and every day we would compare the beautiful tiny picture we had each discovered behind our own numbered windows - a beribboned present, a gingerbread man, a sleigh... And that very special DOUBLE door on the 24th - with the beautiful nativity scene behind it - just wow.
I remember a chocolate advent calendar one year as a pre-teen - I wasn't impressed, though!
I'm glad that you are able to celebrate the season in your own way, these are healthy ingredients to help make a fulfilling life. I don't have as many traditional or ritual elements associated with the Christmas holiday season but to each their own.
This reminds me of something amusing (to me): there's a free web browser game that I played years ago called Kingdom of Loathing (a sarcastic play on traditional RPGs with minimalist graphics and lots of pop culture parodies included). I just started playing it again a week or so ago and sure enough, starting today, the game has it's own Crimbo advent calendar full of daily surprises. An old tradition reignited!