'Tis the season to get grumpy about expensive advent calendars.
'Tis the season to get grumpy about expensive advent calendars.
One of my fondest memories from Christmas involved the excitement of getting one ridiculously small piece of seriously bad chocolate every day, leading up to the big day.
It was a nice symbolic act, cracking through the small cardboard window to get my square of cheap bitter chocolate. December tasted of rancid chocolate and that was part of the magic of the season, knowing the good chocolate would come on the 25th day (or else mum and dad would never hear the end of it).
The symbolism of the wait for Christmas was all that was needed to make me excited.
Fast-forward 30 years and Advent calendars are now leaving a bad taste in my mouth, but for entirely different reasons.
Confession time: last year, I was guilt-tripped into buying a stupidly overpriced advent calendar from Smiggle. I think it cost about $40 (I'd check my bank statement to confirm but that sort of thing scares me so I won't) and it seemed like a good compromise from the even more ridiculously overpriced Lego Advent calendar the 10-year-old was begging for.
The Smiggle calendar (made of plastic pieces of bad stationery that almost instantly broke) set a really bad precedent. When I buy the cheap chocolate Advent calendar from the supermarket this year, instead of excitement, I'm pretty sure I'm going to be met with disappointment.
These expensive calendars represent everything that's wrong with modern materialistic commercial catalogue-frenzied Christmas. Suddenly, if you buy your child one of those cheap Advent calendars near the checkout at the supermarket, you're as bad a parent as the one who never even thought of buying an Advent calendar (those are the parents I envy these days).
In the UK this week, Boots had to slash the price of its ridiculously expensive YouTube-influencer marketed advent calendar. The calendar cost $96 and the contents inside it were found to be available to purchase individually for a total of $38. Faced with mounting controversy (ah, the spirit of the season), the store cut the price down to $48 which is still a criminal amount of money to pay for an advent calendar.
The Guardian this week reported on the rise of luxury Advent calendars, which is apparently now a thing. In the UK, you can get a beauty box Advent calendar for $962 so I am now wondering what you would then get as an actual Christmas present.
You can get wine and beer Advent calendars in New Zealand - and if you are a parent, you kind of need them just to get through this season*.
And sure, you're the adult, you worked for that money and you know that just because you got yourself an expensive treat this time, it doesn't make it the norm.
Kids don't know that. If you're buying them an expensive Advent calendar, on top of their expensive Christmas gifts, you're either committing to buying increasingly expensive Advent calendars for life or to breaking their hearts with bad chocolate next year.
This Christmas, if you're buying an advent calendar, buy the cheap one.
If you don't need to do it for yourself, do it for the parents of the children who go to school with your children, and who'll go home begging for the Lego or Smiggle Advent calendar that their parents really wish they could afford (but really, it's hard enough affording Christmas gifts as it is).
It's time to say no.
The best thing you can do for your children is to avoid the overpriced Advent calendars. They won't thank you anytime soon but, trust me, they will thank you later (quite a bit later, probably once after they have had children themselves).
Maybe 30 years from now, they'll still associate that bitter taste of cheap chocolate with the build up to Christmas (and you can pocket the rest of the money to treat yourself to some actual decent chocolate because, let's face it, it's been a tough year and you've earned it).
Tis the season to give experiences, not cheap plastic gifts Since we're way past the point of me worrying about sounding like the grinch, this whole expensive Advent calendar debacle has prompted the adoption of what I hope becomes a new family tradition.
In the spirit of giving experiences and shared memories, our family last year started our own modified version of the Advent calendar.
All you need is a jar and some bits of paper to write down activities you can all do as a family in the lead up to Christmas.
Because I could not come up with 24 different activities, the jar is all about the 12 days of Christmas (come on, that's enough). In each piece of paper, we wrote a different activity, all free (as a matter of principle). Watch a movie together that the child gets to pick, a trip to the playground, go see the Christmas lights on Franklin Rd, etc. Even if they were things we were planning on doing anyway, they took a whole new meaning when the 10-year-old felt like it was being done for her.
I also bought a couple of chocolate bars and wrote "chocolate" in a couple of the bits of paper since I couldn't come with other activities and, frankly, those were pretty well received too.
We're dusting off the Advent jar again this year so those trips to the playground are about to feel extra special, for no extra cost.
Ten ideas for your Advent Jar 1. Bake Christmas biscuits 2. Trip to the playground 3. Watch a Christmas movie together 4. Make Christmas cards to give to school friends 5. Go for a drive to see Christmas lights 6. Colouring Christmas pictures together 7. Have a dance party with your child's favourite songs (the ones you wish they'd shut up about the rest of the year) 8. Make Christmas-themed pancakes for breakfast 9. Play a boardgame together 10. Stay up a little while past bedtime
