Advent

The Christmas season has always been a very big part of my life, and Advent has always been a very big part of my Christmas season. And as today marks the beginning of the 2022 Advent season (nonsecular Advent, anyway), I decided to make that the topic of today’s blog post. 

When Does the Christmas Season Start?

There seems to be some disagreement on exactly when the Christmas season starts. According to modern consumerism, the Christmas season can start as early as August, with holiday merchandise sharing the seasonal aisles with the Back to School supplies on store shelves.

According to my dear Aunt Grace, the Christmas season didn’t begin until Thanksgiving dinner was over. (Mom usually followed Aunt Grace’s declaration of when the Christmas season started to the letter, ending the year’s moratorium on Christmas music upon our return home from Aunt Grace’s house late Thanksgiving afternoon/evening.)

Aunt Grace died of cancer before ‘Black Friday’ evolved into the commercial Christmas kick-off juggernaut of our current era. So she never got to see her well-defined start to the Christmas season challenged by that several hours long period of time that the post-Thanksgiving sales had mandated. But for many, many people the wee hours of the morning the day after Thanksgiving became their official start to the Christmas holiday.

But classically, the Christmas season begins simultaneously with the season of Advent, on either December 1^st or four Sundays before Christmas day, depending on whether you’re calculating Advent based on its calendar or its wreath. Growing up, I always observed both versions (and would often try to find ways to integrate them into a unified whole, usually by attempting to extend the calendar to encompass the earlier start to the wreath’s Advent).

The Advent Wreath

My earliest Advent memories were not of the calendar but rather the wreath. I would stand there every Sunday and watch as Mom lit that week’s candle (along with those of the previous weeks). At the time I had no idea what the whole thing was about, but I did recognize that there was an importance to it.

As I started to get older, there was still an Advent wreath at home during the holiday season, but my primary wreath-based observations were tied in with my duties as an altar boy during Sunday mass. (No molestation jokes, please.)

I like the origin story of the Advent wreath. Its creation is generally attributed to a German priest doing missionary work. Every day as Christmas approached, he would be asked by the children at the mission school if it was Christmas yet.

So one day he took a wagon wheel, 20 small red candles, and 4 larger white calendars, and then build himself a device to mark the passage of time until Christmas. (Yes, that’s right – the original Advent wreath was actually an Advent calendar.)

Once a day, the kids would gather around and watch as he would light the candles. Every weekday (and Saturday) he would light one additional red candle than he had the day before. On Sundays he would light one of the white candles.

In the years since then, the wreath has evolved somewhat. (Who has room for a whole wagon wheel any more?) A wreath of evergreen (real or artificial), and either four or five candles. Three of one color (for me growing up they were purple), one of another (pink), and the optional white Christ candle in the middle to be lit on Christmas Eve/Day.

I don’t remember the Advent wreath at home being brought out at all during my early teenage years, or during the youth of my brother and sister.

In recent years I’ve noticed the wreath itself getting replaced with an Advent candle holder. The same standard four or five candles, but in some kind of knick-knack type thing. A couple of years before Mom died she got an Advent candle holder that was in the shape of Noah’s Ark.

The Advent Calendar

I’ve already talked about the Advent calendar a little bit in my post on Little Plastic Spacemen. There was always one in the house for the holiday season when I was growing up. With the exception of 1978 (the details of which I covered in the aforementioned post) they were always just the cheap cardboard calendars with the 24 numbered doors over either birth-of-Christ story images or Santa Claus based imagery. You know, Christmas-y stuff.

I was probably in my mid-teens before I saw my first slightly thicker Advent calendar where the doors opened up to reveal little pieces of chocolate.

Once it occurred to me, I always wondered why it went from lowest number to highest instead of being arranged as a countdown to Christmas. If it had been a countdown, you could include the extra days from that first Advent Sunday.

I have since learned that in some countries they do include those late November days, but I haven’t actually seen one of those calendars, so I’m unsure how they do it.

The Strange Advent Miscellany

I couldn’t remember the exact configuration of the original wagon wheel Advent wreath, so I asked my good close personal friend the Internet. Who proceeded to give me far more information than just that, some of which was completely new to me.

It’s not uncommon to pray a daily devotional during Advent. I’ve never done it, but I was aware of the practice.

There are people who put up their Christmas tree and decorate it in stages throughout Advent, which is something I’d never thought of. I don’t know if it’s a daily thing or a once a week thing for each stage, or exactly what each stage entails.

I also discovered the existence of the Christmon tree, a concept which was completely foreign to me. The Christmon tree is an evergreen tree set up in a church, but unlike a Christmas tree, its only decorations are clear lights and gold and white Christmons.

What’s a Christmon? Apparently an ancient symbol for Christ, including the dove (descending), the Celtic cross, the Jerusalem cross, the fish, the shepherds crook, the chalice, and other similar bits of iconography. I had no idea about any of that.

And then there’s the Christingle. (I can’t even look at the word without thinking of the last couple of Spider-Man movies.) I had no idea what that was, either. Here’s what it is: You take an orange (which represents the world). You then push a candle (which, when lit, represents Jesus Christ as the light of the world) through to the center of it. Then you wrap a red ribbon around it (representing the blood of Christ). And then you take four pieces of dried fruit or candy and skewer them on cocktail sticks, then push those into the orange as well (these represent the fruits of the earth and the four seasons). And finally, you light the candle.

I don’t know how that thing came into being, but it seems to me like whoever thought it up had to have at least a passing familiarity with the concept of voodoo.

The Advent Basket

A few years after my grandfather died (and that’s the third reference to a relative dying in this post – weird), Mom decided to put her own spin on the classic Advent calendar, and put together an Advent basket for my grandmother. It was pretty much what it sounds like. Wicker basket with 24 small wrapped gifts, each of which had a numbered sticker on it.

Image Generated By Craiyon   

Mom discovered that she had really enjoyed putting the basket together, and so just started doing one every year for her. The enjoyment that Mom got out of gifting the Advent basket far outweighed Grandma’s enjoyment in receiving it, which I always found sad. Whenever Grandma would talk about the Advent basket her comments would always stop just short of complaints. She always thought that it was a waste of Mom’s time and money. She would also frequently have to open several packages at once, having forgotten or simply neglected to have opened them for several days in a row.

It was always my job to deliver the completed basket to Grandma on November 30^th (not a long journey, as Grandma lived just next door). One year I apparently had a look on my face when Mom handed it over, and she asked what was wrong. I told her that there wasn’t anything wrong, but she pressed me on it and I confessed that after delivering the thing year after year, I kind of wanted an Advent basket of my own.

Anyway, I had completely forgotten this by the following year, so I wasn’t expecting what happened when I returned from Grandma’s after delivering that year’s basket. Mom handed me another Advent basket, and when I just looked at her confused, she told me, “That one’s yours.”

Advent Baskets Galore!

I think that up until that point, Mom simply thought of the Advent basket as something special that she did for her mother every year. I don’t think it had even occurred to her that the Advent basket was something that she could do for people other than Grandma.

I got one every year after that until Mom died. (Actually, now that I think about it, I believe I got one for a couple of years after Mom died as well. I know that my Aunt Mary did one for me one year. And I’m pretty sure that my sister also did one for me for a couple of years.)

But doing that second Advent basket opened up a floodgate somewhere in Mom, because before long, she was also doing Advent baskets for both of my siblings (now that they were old enough to appreciate them) as well as Dad. And then as the years went on, she added other select people to the list of recipients.

One year she made and gave out NINE Advent baskets. (Grandma, me, my brother and sister, Dad, my Aunt Mary, a cousin, a good friend of hers, and one other person who I cannot remember.)

Nothing in an Advent basket was very expensive. There was a fair amount of Dollar Store-type stuff. And Mom shopped for Advent baskets year round. There were two items that you could always count on though. Day #1 was a chocolate filled Advent calendar. And day #6 was a small plush animal, left unwrapped, with the numbered sticker on its tag. And you were not allowed to acknowledge that you could tell what it was until that sixth day when you ‘opened’ it.

Eventually I realized that the only person not getting an Advent basket was Mom. So I resolved that situation and put together an Advent basket for her. I only did it for her that one time though. Advent baskets are harder work than they would seem.

Over the years I did give out two other Advent baskets. One was to my friend Mike. The other was to MMG (not a relative, but also dead in case you’re keeping score). All three of the Advent baskets that I did had some type of plastic sandwich as the gift for day #2. Play food from a toy store. Why? Because I’m very odd. 

Holiday ADVENTures

Mom had the Advent basket. I wanted my own thing, too. As a writer, what I wanted to do was something literary. I wanted to create the Advent novel. A 24 chapter story to be read one installment per day.

The idea first came to me when I was developing storylines for Shorp and Lep (characters that I’m planning to devote a third of a post to in December). Shorp and Lep are basically freelance jacks-of-all-trades living in a colony/metropolis on another planet hundreds of years from now.

I had a storyline where they were hired to track down the missing pieces of the mechanism that generated the colony’s holographic Nativity scene following the break-in at a storage facility by vandals. And things keep going wrong because, as Lep keeps telling people, nothing ever goes right for him in December.

So, if I would have stopped and written it instead of continuing to plot out their (fairly ridiculous) timeline, that is the idea that would have become “Surviving December – a Shorp & Lep ADVENTure”.

My second Advent novel concept took place at the North Pole, and involved Santa, the Mrs. (named Faith in my rendition), and a bunch of characters I’d created for my version of the Santa Claus legend. Including the dwarves that work in Santa’s coal mine (because where else would he be getting all that coal from), a sentient and animate snowman priest named Parson Brown, the bartender at the Sleigh-and-Eight, and the DJ at the North Pole’s radio station, which plays nothing but Christmas music 24/7/365.

There was a plot thread running through the whole thing, but each chapter would have read more or less as a stand-alone short story. I can’t remember if I ever got around to coming up with a name for that one or not.

I had another Advent novel idea set in that same mythos, but this one came to me during the erotica period of trying to break through my writer’s block. It would have been titled “Faith & Fetish” and told the story of Faith Claus going out of her way to keep her and Santa’s sex life both active and interesting during his busy time of the year.

I had also outlined a fan fiction Advent novel set in DC’s Gotham City during a holiday crime wave that Batman had to tackle. Poison Ivy had created a bunch of flavored lip balms called “Mistletoe Kisses” that were deadly when certain flavors came in contact with one another. I also had an idea about her attacking Christmas tree salesmen and amputating their legs as revenge for the trees, but I really wasn’t sure about including that in the work or not.

Being winter in Gotham I would have had Mr. Freeze show up. Two-Face would have been focusing his fixation on duality upon the whole ‘naughty or nice’ thing. And of course I couldn’t have a story formatted on the concept of Advent and not include the Calendar Man. That would have just been wrong.

Advent Calendar Evolution

I don’t know when the last time was that I saw an old school flat Advent calendar with simple pictures behind doors. I’m not sure they’re even made anymore. The least ‘advanced’ Advent calendar I’ve seen recently is the chocolate filled variety.

Nowadays, the typical Advent calendar contains 24 things. Usually toys if they’re being aimed at kids. A variety of other stuff for adults.

I’ve seen Advent calendars listed on Amazon containing plastic dinosaurs, play jewelry, science experiments, Christmas-themed mini rubber duckies, military action figures, construction vehicles, fidget toys, and pretty much anything else you can think of. Build-a-Bear does an Advent calendar. Also Playmobil. Funko Pop has a bunch of them. And the expected plethora of Advent calendars for licensed characters: Super Mario, My Little Pony, DC Superheroes, Mickey Mouse (and Friends), the Grinch, and so on.

I think that LEGO is up to five different Advent calendars each year now. Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel, and their own City and Friends themes. For the past five or six years my Aunt Mary has gotten me a LEGO Advent calendar for the season, which I have absolutely loved.

I mentioned calendars for adults. These include such themed Advent calendars as Christmas ornaments, high-end gourmet chocolates, single-serve gourmet coffees, beef jerky, sudoku puzzles, nail polish, tea, mini jigsaw puzzles, and tiny little bottles of booze.

Okay, slightly shorter post than usual today. Probably be back to the typical long-winded standard next time.