December is a rather unusual month for me. My birthday is in December, as is Christmas and New Year’s Eve. By many metrics it’s also the end of often discretely-viewed periods of time (Q4, H2, a year – this year, a decade as well). It thus tends to lend itself particularly well to both introspection as well as frenzied rushes to complete things before the end of the relevant period.
The Biblical season of Advent begins four Sundays before Christmas and focuses on preparation for and awaiting the celebration of Jesus’s birth. This means that the day on which Advent begins varies depending on which day of the week Christmas falls on (if Christmas is itself a Monday, then four Sundays before that would be the 3rd of December; conversely if Christmas is itself a Sunday, four Sundays before that would be the 27th of November). I was aware of the season in terms of its observance in church, though I don’t think it manifested much outside that.
The name originates from the Latin adventus; more generally there is the word advent which can also be used to describe something arriving that is significant (e.g. “with the advent of refrigeration, fresh food could be kept fresh for longer” is good, while I’d find “the 20th of September marks my advent in the UK” strange unless you’re someone who made significant changes to the UK). The naming of the season is apt from a Christian perspective (for obvious reasons), and probably even without one (though that’s a separate discussion).
I first came across the concept of an advent calendar, which as the same suggests counts down the days to Christmas during Advent, on a virtual pets site called Neopets. On Neopets, this offered a gift and a small amount of the site’s currency every day during December (though, differently from most advent calendars, this included the days from December 26 to 31 as well). However, apart from the Neopets one I wasn’t aware of this being a tradition in Singapore (or elsewhere, for that matter).
The idea of gifts isn’t inherent to advent calendars (initial versions served very much as mechanisms to track the days to Christmas as well), though it is common, especially in commercial contexts. I saw many more of these when I came to the UK – perhaps this makes sense, as Neopets was started by British developers. Many commercial advent calendars feature small items in 24 or 25 sealed and opaque, but individually openable compartments. The idea here is that one tracks the days to Christmas by opening each compartment only when the relevant day arrives: on December 1, the door marked 1 is opened, and so on until the last day. There’s technically nothing stopping one from opening the later compartments early, but I guess one would be cheating oneself of the theorised anticipation and excitement in the build-up to Christmas.
I tend to associate these primarily with chocolate (I probably first encountered these in Sainsbury’s in my first year), though many other variations (beauty products, alcohol, toys etc.) exist. There are also purpose-built empty containers (presumably intended for people to buy for their kids or spouses) with 24 or 25 small drawers or pockets.
There is even a fairly popular advent calendar for programming problems (Advent of Code), which I’ve found useful to get a bit of algorithm/data structure practice. I’ll be doing that this year in Haskell (maintaining the option to switch to Java or Python if things get too difficult or I get too busy, especially later on in the series).
There’s probably something to be said around what constitutes a good countdown to Christmas. I’ll admit that on first reaction, I find a number of the commercial ones out there a little awkward. However, the definition of ‘good’ is likely to be highly dependent on what one views the Christmas period to be about. For example, among other things I want to be able to evaluate and introspect on the year gone by, and also to be present when spending time with family and friends – and I find that, say, an alcohol-based calendar is helpful for neither end. However, these could be appropriate for someone who finds this to be helpful because they enjoy it, and/or for giving them confidence to interact and/or interact better with family and friends.
