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Over the past week, millions of doors across Britain have been gently opened. After tearing back a thin curtain, hands young and old have reached inside to extract a small, sweet, sought-after item from its casing. What was taken, it’s safe to say, will never be seen again.
I am alluding not to a sudden wave of house burglaries but to advent, which signals the return of calendars across the nation — most of which contain chocolate. Beginning traditionally on the fourth Sunday before Christmas and ending on December 24, the period is one of reflection and preparation for Christians before they celebrate the birth of Jesus.
This year, there is a new calendar entrant from a rather unlikely place. The Church of England has, for the first time in its history, released an advent calendar. On sale for £3.99, it requires users to pair the right sticker with each of the 24 days so that they end up with a complete Nativity scene.
The church says it commissioned the calendar so it could offer “something that would enable the Nativity story to be shared between children and parents”. The Rt Rev Sam Corley, bishop of Stockport, tells me the aim of the calendar — which comes alongside a new carol, “The First Nowell” — is to get back to the original meaning of Christmas and provide a “different experience” from the proliferation of other calendar gifts that we have grown used to.
In the past, after all, advent was marked for many by abstinence, rather than indulgence: people would fast in the run-up to December 25, at which point food — meat in particular — that had been forsaken for weeks would be relished for 12 days until Epiphany, when the Magi visited Jesus, according to the Bible.
The tradition of advent calendars began life in 19th-century Germany, where Lutherans marked the countdown to Christmas by marking doors or floors with chalk, lighting candles and displaying devotional images in their homes. By the 1900s, small boxes made typically of wood or cardboard had religious imagery or biblical verses placed inside them.
Gerhard Lang is credited with making the first printed calendar around the same time, and adding chocolate to the design, although cardboard rationing during the second world war led his business to fold.
Shortages of materials did not stop the Nazi party from publishing a non-religious version in book form in 1943, however. Underlining the importance of family and military service to young German readers, it featured pictures of neatly decorated gingerbread next to a helmet and gun and a bright, floral wreath with a swastika at its centre.
In the US, sales of advent calendars were boosted by a photograph of then president Dwight Eisenhower’s grandchildren opening the “Little Christmas Town” calendar in 1954. The first chocolate calendar is believed to have been sold in the UK around then, although it wasn’t until Cadbury, the confectioner, began making a mass market one in 1971 that the product caught on.
Judging by the aisle devoted to Christmas-related goods in my local supermarket, chocolate remains by far the most popular calendar filling. But consumers today have a great variety to choose from: cheese, coffee, chilli sauce, toys, cosmetics and even fine bone china are all on offer in the rectangular cardboard boxes. Krystina Houghton, seasonal confectionery buyer at Waitrose, says ranges offering “more sophisticated flavours”, including tea and gin, have been selling especially well.
Perhaps, given this explosion in epicurean calendars, it is no bad thing that the Church of England is nudging the faithful towards a more traditional understanding of what advent is all about. With England and Wales preparing for another Christmas as minority Christian countries, according to census data published last year, the CoE’s advent offering seems unlikely to reverse the trend of people declaring themselves to be of “no religion”. All the same, it’s an intriguing blend of old and new — and a low-cost and zero-calorie way of channelling the Christmas spirit to boot.
franklin.nelson@ft.com
