a note to self
greetings from the other side of Christmas! Today is zweiter Weihnachtstag here in Germany, or “second Christmas”/boxing day, and the streets are relatively quiet, with almost all businesses still closed and storefronts left unlit except for the occasional kiosk (like a bodega/newsstand in New York except without a deli counter). and good news re: savoy cabbage rolls - they turned out great! man i’m in love with the bright green color of savoy cabbages - it reminds me of jade or emerald and i feel so invigorated just by looking at them.
today i am writing a note-to-myself on advent calendars in the hope that i will think back in future prelude-to-christmas seasons and remember this little tinge of doubt i am currently feeling:
are they worth it?
towards the end of every november since I’ve moved to germany I have become, without fail, suddenly and inexplicably enthusiastic about advent calendars. i always insist on buying them not only for myself and Ulrich but also for his daughters, Anneliese and Greta, who live on their own about 20 and 30 minutes away from us by car, so that we can send Snapchats to each other of the tiny present reveals every day from Dec. 1st-Dec. 24th. I had heard of advent and advent calendars before but never been bombarded with the level of advent commercialism i have seen here; if i remember correctly, advent calendars in the U.S. were only available online and mainly through high-brow, niche websites - i.e. a $150 whisky or cigar calendar which catered to the connoisseur. Here in Germany, advent calendars are as ubiquitous in November as candy corn or Reese’s pumpkins in the U.S. in October - you see them available for sale everywhere and at every price point, from drugstores to grocery stores to department stores to gucci and givenchy and beyond. and so, as someone who still hasn’t learned to weather the advent marketing storm since i arrived here 4 years ago, i find myself getting inevitably sucked in every time like a moth to a flame: not only by the sparkly packaging, but also by the endearing idea of opening tiny presents every day, each cardboard door bearing a new surprise.
And so, to satiate my enthusiasm, Anneliese, Greta, Ulrich and I have this recurring Snapchat group which I first created in 2018, and which we never use except for the 24 days in December each year in which our explicit task is to send daily Snaps with photos or videos of us opening each calendar door. I used to spend up to half an hour on each Snap, drawing doodles and faces and on very ambitious occasions entire scenes on top of each photo, back then when it was still cool to add your own creative flair to a Shapchat photo (Snap filters already existed in 2018 but with a far slimmer selection). I did not suppress my disappointment when one of the kids occasionally forgot to open a calendar door, sending cry-face emojis to guilt trip them into catching back up with double- or triple- Snap messages at the earliest opportunity. When Ulrich and I visited Vienna one weekend in 2019, we brought back special Mozart Praline-themed advent calendars for ourselves to offset the makeup-themed ones which the girls had requested. But fast forward to 2022 and it is now Ulrich and I, not Anneliese or Greta, who most often forget to open our calendars - we each had to send massive catch-up Snaps after a 4-day-in-a-row forgetting streak last week - in part because we chose the cheapest, variety-less calendars for ourselves at the last minute. Ulrich picked the absolute worst, a small gray rectangle with the word “Männersache” (“men’s thing”) emblazoned over a picture of santa claus riding a motorcycle and sunglasses and containing the same marzipan pralines 24 days in a row. Mine was only marginally better: a vaguely Empire State Building-shaped Lindt box which included 6 different types of chocolates, each of which appeared 4 times throughout the month. the main problem was that I didn’t wind up liking any of the saccharine, plasticky flavors! We chose fancier calendars for Anneliese and Greta: Anneliese got muesli to-go cups (practical for a starving college student!) whose flavors were never repeated and Greta got 12 types of pralines from a vegan/gluten-free confectionery in Hamburg.
By december 3rd or 4th Ulrich and I were already bored with our calendars, and I’m guessing the novelty probably wore off for Anneliese and Greta not long after that. And by the end of the month the daily Snaps had become a repetitive chore rather than a highlight of our day. Ulrich and I each wound up mechanically reusing 1 or 2 filters over and over; long gone were the days when i used to draw an individualized doodle for each Snap. on Christmas Eve, after we had sent out our final snaps for the 2022 advent season, Ulrich turned to me and said: “now let’s get rid of all this packaging right away.” I nodded wordlessly and immediately began ripping the plastic trays out of their colorful paper skeletons, tore the needle off the top of the Lindt skyscraper and then stomped on top of the pile while wearing my house slippers in order to flatten it. after i fed our cardboard carcasses into the rectangular mouth of one of the paper recycling containers at the end of our street, i found myself thinking: man, this feels kind of anti-climactic… was it worth all that hype and effort?
of course it is possible to make custom advent calendars with thoughtful, hand-selected presents for each day, although for some reason i have never quite had the appetite to assemble one - somehow the thrill of an impulse purchase has always felt satisfying enough! and of course I am deciding right now, as I have done every year before this, to yet again put off deciding until next year whether or not to propose a continuation of our somewhat contrived advent-Snapchat tradition to Ulrich and the kids. : )