The Instagram ad for the Knitters’ Advent Calendar promised two things I love: spiritual preparation for the Christmas season and two dozen skeins of yarn for my creative projects. But clicking the ad activated the algorithm, which alerted me to other Advent options. There were multiple crochet and other crafting Advent calendars, but also ones filled with puzzles or perfume. There was an “experiment-a-day” science calendar and a “luxe body care” one. On the food front, there were calendars inviting me to sample twenty-four days of popcorn, jelly, honey, hot sauce, nuts, black licorice—the list went on. As one advertisement read, “Advent calendars aren’t just for chocolate anymore.”
I thought they weren’t actually for chocolate either. I still held the idealist image of young children excitedly opening a door just for the thrill of opening it and knowing that Christmas had crept one day closer. But clearly, Advent has become just another monetizable opportunity. In fact, Americans spend half a billion dollars a year on Advent calendars, according to a 2024 market-research report that predicts substantial growth thanks to “continuous innovation in product types and themes.” Globally, Advent calendars bring in $1.87 billion a year.
A few days later, I picked up the weekly flyer for Aldi, the German-owned grocery store with attractively low prices in these inflationary times. The chain is also famous for its “aisle of shame,” which offers seasonal and other nonfood merchandise known for its almost addictive attraction to shoppers who, shamefully, leave the store $100 lighter even though they came just for a gallon of milk. Aldi’s Advent calendars—offering not just chocolate, but also wine, beer, cheese, coffee, and dog biscuits—have prompted such devotion that lines form outside stores before opening time and resellers jack up the prices on eBay. They’re almost as desirable as Taylor Swift tickets. (Yes, you can also get a Taylor Swift Advent calendar, though not at Aldi.)
But it was the Squishmallows twelve-day Advent calendar that sent me into a spiral, and not because of the cute stuffed animals behind the closed doors.
“Twelve days?!” It was bad enough that even the twenty-four-day “commercial” Advent calendars begin on December 1, clearly unmoored from the actual liturgical calendar, which places the beginning of the season on the fourth Sunday before Christmas. But a twelve-day Advent calendar? Was this some sort of “Twelve Days of Christmas” in reverse?
“Well, we never got any of the good Advent calendars anyway,” said one of my teenagers, who never touched the $1.99 chocolate one I bought last year. Apparently cool parents buy theirs from Lego or Anthropologie or Sephora. I didn’t tell her that when I was a kid, I never even got a chocolate one. My parents may have occasionally purchased the kind where you opened a cardboard door to reveal a little picture or a snippet of Scripture. And the parish where I went to school had a Jesse Tree, hung with felt ornaments that traced the lineage of Jesus throughout Advent. (My sister and I later recreated Jesse Trees for our families.)
Of course, the Church’s traditional way of marking the weeks of waiting and preparation for Christ at Christmas—and ultimately his return at the Second Coming—is with the lighting of candles on the Advent wreath. The Advent calendar, like many of our contemporary Christmas customs, traces its history to Germany, where Christians counted down the days until Yuletide by lighting candles, placing straw in a Nativity crib, or ticking the walls or doors with chalk. In the early twentieth century, the first commercially printed calendars appeared, with German publisher Gerhard Lang credited with adding the small doors in the 1920s. After World War II, returning service members brought them back to the United States, and by the 1950s, Advent calendars began hiding chocolate behind the closed doors.
Since the practice has a commercial history, it’s maybe a bit Grinchy to complain about its overcommercialization. Or maybe I should be grateful that the culture has co-opted—I mean, adopted—a Church practice, or at least the “Advent” language, especially amid rising religious disaffiliation. U.S. consumers are at least thinking of Advent, even if they think it’s a twelve-day celebration of buying more stuff.
It’s conceivable that the Star Wars and Skims panties Advent calendars (I kid you not) still stir those feelings of anticipation and mystery at the heart of the Advent season. As spiritual author Jessica Mesman has written, doors are liminal spaces; Jesus both stands in the doorway and invites us in, and he is the door, for those inside and outside of the Church. The symbolic opening of Advent calendar doors—no matter what’s inside—helps us experience the season’s magic and mystery, she says. This is what I’ll keep in mind. Also, I definitely don’t need twenty-four more skeins of yarn.
