For whatever reason, I like the extremely modest thrill of getting a little surprise on each day in December. There are really really cheap Advent Calendars that have basically the same piece of garbage chocolate behind each door (sometimes in different shapes, sometimes not…) Last year I splurged and got myself a rather expensive Godiva Advent Calendar and didn’t find it to be worth the $$.
Any Advent Calendars you or your family has enjoyed in the past? It certainly doesn’t have to be chocolate-centric but chocolate always helps
The last couple of years, I’ve gotten an advent calendar from Aldi that had pretty good chocolates. They’ve also offered cheese and wine advent calendars.
Their German beer one wasn’t half bad several years back. Of course, you have to be prepared to down a pint can of beer every night leading up to Christmas.
Dumb question: is this a newish thing - that is, having little prizes for each day of the calendar? I’ve never seen an advent calendar that had stuff behind the doors. In my admittedly limited experience, advent calendars show a nativity scene, usually with some glitter for good measure, and have somewhat hard-to-find numbered doors that you open to read a bible verse inside, possibly with another tiny picture.
Clearly, I’ve been missing out. I’ve been settling for bible verses all these years when I could have had swag!
I don’t know precisely how “new” they are, but my wife used to teach at a parochial elementary school, and she had an Advent calendar, which she’d bought from some Christian store, at least 20 years ago – the calendar, which was re-usable, had a “piece” of a Nativity scene behind each door. She and her class would open up the appropriate door each morning (I suppose that, on Mondays, they’d also catch up on the weekend’s doors), and place the item in the growing Nativity scene.
For the niche audience of fountain pen enthusiasts, there is an ink bottle advent calendar, with little bottles of 12 mls of ink, brand new and never before seen, and each year has a theme. I believe this started in 2019, or at least that’s when I first heard of it, and they didn’t have one in 2020 because Covid, so this year will be the third one. It’s created by one of the large ink companies (Diamine) and sold through online pen shops. This year is the green edition (previous ones were red and blue), so 25 little bottles of new green-related fountain pen inks. It will probably sell out like last year’s did. Oh, the bottle for the 25th is a bigger size.
And at least personally, I’d never been aware that non-chocolate advent calendars were a thing. It seems like they must have been around for decades prior to become that pervasive.
How does a wine, beer, or other “hefty” advent calendar work? I could see making a box of chocolates into an advent calendar, but … wine? Is there a coupon in each compartment or something?
Clearly I am far, far behind the times, as when I did a GIS on “advent calendar” all these new-fangled materialistic prize-oriented calendars came up. I had to add the word “traditional” to get an image closer to what I remember, and even then I didn’t really see a lot of what I consider standard.
