Thursday · December 02 2004
Leslie Harpold's 2004 Advent Calendar
Awesome daily, winter linkage, stories, and recipes every day til Christmas. Another link to bookmark and return to all month long.
Did you have a chocolate filled Advent calendar when you were small? Each perforated window hid a piece of not very tasty chocolate molded into the shape of a toy or present. Did you ever find one of those calendars several years later and discover that you stopped opening the windows December 13th and twelve hard, discolored hobby-horse shaped hunks of chocolate were waiting for you?
I don't think we ever quit mid-month. There was always such a huge deal made of my brother and I getting the candy on alternative days. It caused several disputes.
I have some friends who are not at all religious, but they do the Advent calendar because the mom is German and its a German thing. Their little kids (girls 5 and 8) are apeshit about it.
My Swedish mom put up a calendar made of cloth in the kitchen every year. There was a green christmas tree sewed on to it, and at the bottom there were 24 little toy ornaments on hooks. We got to move one of the ornaments on to the tree every morning. On the 24th there was a start made of straw which had to be hung from the top of the tree.
It was cool to glance at the tree and be able to gauge how close Christmas was by how dense the ornaments were. I remember fighting with my brother and sisters over who got to move which ornaments. The straw star was the biggest issue. My mother had to carefully alternate us so that we each got to put it up once every four years. Wow.