HOW I RUINED CHRISTMAS

You never get too old to enjoy Christ­mas. I saw proof of that last year in what has since be­come known in our house as “cal­en­dar­gate”. For as long as I can re­mem­ber, and as one of those tra­di­tions from the old coun­try that I’ve tried to pass on to my chil­dren, I have bought my son and daugh­ter an ad­vent cal­en­dar every year.

It hasn’t al­ways been easy to find a suit­ably at­trac­tive ad­vent cal­en­dar, which in case you are un­fa­mil­iar with them are tra­di­tional cal­en­dars with 25 com­part­ments con­tain­ing treats – often choco­lates – that you open each day of De­cem­ber in the run-up to Christ­mas. You can see a typ­i­cal ex­am­ple in the image that ac­com­pa­nies this ar­ti­cle.

As the years have gone by it has be­come much eas­ier to find ad­vent cal­en­dars, and today you can roll up to most su­per­mar­kets and throw one in the shop­ping bas­ket along with the bleach and the cat food.

How­ever, find­ing the right ad­vent cal­en­dar is an­other thing. Some cal­en­dars are too ’girly’, some are too ’butch’, some are too child­ish, some don’t have the right type of choco­late, some are too flimsy while oth­ers are too ex­pen­sive for what they offer.

Be­fore I go on, I thought I’d share some of the weird and won­der­ful ad­vent cal­en­dars I have seen out there. If you’re not a choco­late fan but you like to kick back with a cold one then the Brew­dog Craft Beer Ad­vent Cal­en­dar might be for you, as every day in­stead of a sweet treat you get a can of craft beer. Mean­while, the Happy Socks 24-Pack Ad­vent Cal­en­dar Gift Set of­fers a daily pair of de­signer socks, and the Per­son­alised Spo­tify Christ­mas ad­vent cal­en­dar pro­vides a dif­fer­ent Christ­mas song each day that can be ac­cessed with your smart­phone. The Seed Ad­vent Cal­en­dar has dif­fer­ent seeds to plant each day and for an­i­mal lovers there’s the Wood­mansterne Dog Treat Ad­vent Cal­en­dar that has a daily dog bis­cuit for your four-legged friend. It might be a bit late now, but some­thing to bear in mind for next year.

But let’s get back to “cal­en­dar­gate”.

At the end of No­vem­ber last year I found my­self in the mid­dle of a busy pe­riod and was very pressed for time, and so I got all the way to the last day of the month with­out even think­ing about my kids’ ad­vent cal­en­dars. Should I drop every­thing and go scout­ing for last-minute ad­vent cal­en­dars now or – and this is where I went wrong – should I leave it till the next day as surely they won’t have been so quick to clear the shelves of cal­en­dars?

So, early on De­cem­ber 1, I rode over to a local hy­per­mar­ket and dis­cov­ered that they had in fact cleared the shelves of ad­vent cal­en­dars, and it was a sim­i­lar story every­where else I went. There wasn’t an ad­vent cal­en­dar to be had any­where in the county. As I re­turned home empty-handed, I con­soled my­self with the thought that my chil­dren are now aged 21 and 19 and that they are kids no longer and would shrug the whole thing off like the level-headed adults they now are. In fact, I ar­gued to my­self, I was doing them a favour break­ing with a child­ish tra­di­tion that surely no longer had the same at­trac­tion.

Not a bit of it, in fact by their re­ac­tion you would have thought that I’d gam­bled away their in­her­i­tance, and I was in­formed in no un­cer­tain terms that I had se­ri­ously let the side down and that with­out hav­ing a lit­tle card­board door to open every morn­ing in De­cem­ber Christ­mas just isn’t the same.

Opin­ion