What is an Advent calendar?

The tradition of counting the remaining days in December until the most magical holiday of the year, Christmas, and celebrating each one with a small gift dates back over a hundred years, and the history of Advent calendars dates back to the 17th century.

Modern Christmas calendars (German: Adventskalender) are of course quite different. Advent begins for Catholics and Protestants on the Sunday four weeks before Christmas, and symbolises the period of pre-Christmas fasting. The Latin word "Advent" means "coming". Each Sunday, one of the four candles was lit on a wreath of spruce branches. And every day in December, as early as the 17th century, it was customary to hang pictures with biblical motifs on the walls. The first Advent calendar, which resembles our own today, was published in 1851. Ten years later, a printed version appeared in a church in Hamburg. In 1904, the German newspaper Neues Tagblatt Stuttgart offered its readers a gift: a Christmas calendar was enclosed with the printed edition.

Gerhard Lang, the son of a Protestant pastor from the small town of Maulbron, and his mother are to thank for the appearance of the now familiar Christmas calendar in the form of a chest or cardboard box with windows. Little Gerhard kept pestering his mother with the question, "When will it finally be Christmas?" The woman, whose imagination was enviable, found an ingenious way out. She drew 24 windows on cardboard and sewed a Wibele - a tiny biscuit - into each of them. Legend has it that, in 1908, thanks to Gerhard Lang, the first factory-made Christmas calendar rolled off the production line. From 1920 onwards, calendars with a little surprise hidden behind them were produced.

The real popularity of Christmas calendars came in the fifties of the 20th century, during the economic boom in West Germany. It was then that they became a "mass-market product". The tradition then spread throughout Europe. Advent calendars usually have an educational purpose: the child, before opening a new window, has to remember the good and bad of the current day. And the rule of opening one envelope a day helps to build self-control and patience. In recent years, Christmas calendars have begun to appear in Russia, and only in Russia has the Advent calendar turned into a "New Year's calendar," completely losing its religious aspect. Whether you choose to use our Advent calendar for Christmas or New Year, it is entirely up to you!