The 12 Days of Donkmas - The Advent Calendar

Day 12 - The Advent Calendar

By far the most important Christmas tradition my family had growing up was the nightly updating of our advent calendars.  There were three of them.  Two of them showed snowy small towns.  Several of the windows, doors, and other parts of the town were numbered tabs.  When you opened up the tab for the corresponding day, a scene from inside the house was revealed.  The third advent calendar was a hand-made tapestry of a Christmas tree.  Below the tree were numbered pockets in which sat stuffed ornaments.  Each day you would take an ornament out and snap it onto the tree wherever you wanted.

I still get a little chill of glee when I think back to this nightly ritual.  It was important to me for the typical, shallow, kid reasons: each day passed meant one day closer to presents after all.  But I think on some deeper level that the real magic of this Christmas ritual lay in the gathering together of my family each night to perform a cherished task.  It’s the real reason that it sticks with me to this day, the reason that I can still see us all gathered together in the small hall of our rented, 900 square foot house; my father’s rough hand on my shoulder, my mom’s infectious laughter at something my sister said.

The Devil’s in the details they say, and I guess in this case it’s true, because of all the Christmas gifts I’ve received over the years, all the parties I’ve attended, all the goodies I’ve eaten, and all of the other “stuff” that makes the holiday what it is, nothing stands out more to me than those precious moments around the advent calendars.  I’d return all of the Christmas gifts I’ve ever been given just to be able to go back in time and open one of those silly little windows with my family just one more time.

Well, except maybe the BMX bike I got that one year…and the IPod…and of course the golf clubs I got in 2004…and then there’s the……