Every year I unpack the log cabin Advent calendar my mother gave us when my oldest son was my only son. I wanted to bring a new holiday tradition to my own little – and soon to grow – family. After a year or so of punch-paper Advent calendars filled with waxy chocolates, a box arrived from one of those mail order specialty gift catalogs.
Merry Christmas, the card read, May this house be full of joy each year. Love, Mom.
Every year it is.
If I go hard for anything at Christmas, it’s the Advent calendar(s). Christmas stockings, too, but that’s a post for a later reflection.
What I love about the Advent countdown is spreading out the glad tidings over 24 days instead of saving all the cheer for Christmas morning. It lasts longer and it may be just that simple. I mean, who doesn’t want more merry?
When my kids were little, I had to be pretty strict about whose turn it was to open the numbered door or drawer of the log cabin. Otherwise they might tear each other’s hair or rip each other’s arms out to be first. Usually, they found foil-wrapped chocolate Santas or ornaments from the Bath Sweet Shoppe, back when a bag of holiday candy – enough to fill the Advent calendar of three greedy little boys (and their stockings, too) – cost about $25.
Over the years, the Advent calendar also held other surprises. Playmobil pieces dispersed among drawers as clues to the bigger set Santa might leave under the tree. Legos that built a Ninjago thingie a handful of bricks at a time (yes, my kids fought over these, too). As they grew, each day might be filled with candy leading up to one bigger surprise each week, like cinema tickets the years Star Wars premiered a movie.
There was the year of kindnesses (plus chocolate). I leave one of its prompts behind the door to find over and over again when I unbox Christmas. It’s an evergreen reminder.
The Advent house is empty now, though I still take it out and set it up. Memories spill from it. I unwrap them in my mind, swallow them in my heart.
The kids are grown up, but I honor Advent anyway. I give them each a punch-paper calendar with slightly better chocolate from Trader Joe’s. These simple cardboard boxes might get tossed in the backseat of a Jeep, tucked in a messenger bag and lugged from one lab meeting to the next. No one’s looking so someone might eat all the chocolate in their calendar in a single day. Another might find theirs in May completely intact under a stack of books.
It doesn’t matter how my family encounters Advent as young adults. I hope, just as my mother did, that when they do, at Christmas, or when they clean out their cars, or in a melted mess in August, they will know how very much they are loved.
Raye S. Leonard 