The Advent Calender

Originally designed for children of the Christmas faith to countdown the days of Advent and now generically the first of December to the 24th. The Advent calendar has been commercialised into a way to sell a small amount of Chocolate for a very high price. I am a big believer in Advent candles either as a child friendly way of understanding and celebrating the coming of Christ or as a simple way of focusing Children on the lead up to Christmas and the extra tasks involved. I once again do not advocate the use of chocolate and other confectionery based Advent calendars but instead recommend purchasing an empty Advent calendar that you can put what you want into. As a child most of ours were the simple Christian window type calendars telling the story of the birth of Christ. As I got older we created our own Advent Calendars with a special job for each person each day of Advent and a small gift. These gifts often had things like hair ties, hair clips, Marbles, a balloon and string, Christmas stickers and similar. The jobs were extras to our normal chores to make the house ready for the Christmas season and visitors. Jobs included polishing silver, cleaning the fireplace, washing the bowls etc that would be used over the season, making Christmas cakes, plum pudding , pavelova and biscuits. Everyone was expected to muck in over the Christmas period and we did.