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