Advent Calendars

One of my family's Christmas traditions when I was a kid was an advent calendar that told the Christmas story. For those of you who don't know, an advent calendar is something with 24 numbered flaps, one for each day in December before Christmas. You open one flap per day, and each one has something different under it. My family used the same one every year. Each December night, Robert and I knew we could look forward to opening a flap on the advent calendar and hearing mom read us a Christmas bedtime story from the book "A Story a Day until Christmas."

Since advent calendars are not particularly popular in the United States, I never had one of my own. Last year, I was excited to find one at Wal-Mart in Tuscaloosa, although I was rather disappointed to find that it had a piece of bad-tasting chocolate under each flap rather than a line from the Christmas story.

Recently, I was very pleased to learn the advent calendars are enormously popular in Germany. They are everywhere! There are Lego advent calendars, Milka chocolate advent calendars, and ones filled with an assortment of other surprises. I eagerly purchased one produced by the German company Playmobil.

Playmobil's advent calendars are intended to be assembled by parents for their children, so I had to put it together myself. I really don't remember which items are for which day, though, so opening it should still be a lot of fun. Even though November has barely begun, I can hardly wait for December (and day 1 of the calendar) to arrive.

The box...Doesn't this look like fun?

My advent calendar