ADVENT CALENDARS


LUV - Let’s face it, most aspects of Christmas get shitter as you get older. Going to see the Christmas lights being turned on? Magical and exciting when you were a kid, right? But now all you can think is how it’s raining, cold and the street is packed by gasping morons who all want to be standing exactly where your feet are, and - actually - which celebrity is turning on the Christmas lights this year? You can’t really see because you’re shortsighted now, but you’re pretty sure that whoever it is doesn’t even have the decency to be Peter Andre.


Christmas stockings? Nothing says “I don’t know who you are anymore and I’m afraid to ask in case you take my panic button away” like a parental stocking filled with desultory Ryman’s bargain bin goods. And Christmas Day. Oh, Christmas Day used to be brilliant. It used to start with The Snowman and end in sledding. But now you’re a grown-up, and you’re in a relationship, so you have to spend Christmas Day in an itchy jumper discussing the failings of David Cameron with reactionary blowhards who aren’t even related to you. And then you have to do their washing up.


But the advent calendar is the exception.


Yes, the humble advent calendar - with its tricky foil and nothingy-tasting chocolate - is the only bit of Christmas that actually gets better as you get older, mostly because there’s no real justification for having one past the age of eighteen. It’s absurdly pleasing to have, on the one hand, a mortgage, and on the other a Hannah Montana chocolate advent calendar complete with a cut-out-and-keep Miley Cyrus, and anyone who gives you one is only enabling your infantilism. Which means you can legitimately flake out of seeing them because you’d rather play Zelda, and sulk with impunity when you don’t get your own way.


Also, December is an odd month. It starts with everyone standing around in the thin winter daylight, saying “December? Already? How did that happen?” and Christmas a winking beacon in the distance, then suddenly, WHOOSH! It’s all frantic trips to the shops and work dos and laddered tights and acid reflux. And at some point, generally around 21st December, you realise you haven’t opened your advent calendar for days.


And that, my friends, is the sweet spot. That is how you reclaim Christmas.


By being fully two hours late for work because you’ve patiently picked at the cardboard and foil, piled the thin little tree and pudding and turkey chocolate shapes in your hand, and jammed the lot into your mouth in gloriously gluttonous, nothingy, chocolatey triumph.


Advent calendars. LUV. Of course this may be purely because I have a Hotel Chocolat advent calendar this year, and am feeling a little smug.
- Robyn Wilder


HAT - In theory, advent calendars are wonderful inventions. But that means nothing. In theory, bumblebees can’t fly. In theory, there’s no way that you could possibly be that much of a dickhead. But they can fly, and you are that much of a dickhead. And, I’m sorry to say, advent calendars are an unstoppable pile of toilet.


The idea of an advent calendar is brilliant. Anything that involves eating chocolate for breakfast is brilliant. Of course it is. I’m not an animal. But the reality of it - the sheer fucking rigmarole of an advent calendar - is a giant pain in both of my balls.


Take the advent calendar I’ve got this year, for instance. It’s a Divine Fairtrade advent calendar, which is annoying enough already, but getting into the fucker is a Krypton Factor-esque challenge of all my hard-won faculties. For starters, you have to locate the correct window. In a sane and just world, these would be listed neatly and in numerical order, from left to right and top to bottom. But OH NO. That would be too easy for those Fairtrade advent ballbags. Instead, they’ve scattered the numbers around the calendar all willy-nilly. The top row alone goes 7, 21, 23, 8. What sort of erratic fucking bellend of a filing system goes 7, 21, 23, 8? A really shit one, that’s what.


AND the numbers are printed in a shade of gold that makes them totally bastard impossible to read in any situation, let alone first thing in the morning when it’s still dark and your eyes are still foggy from sleep. Why would the Divine Fairtrade chocolate company use that shade of gold? Because they HATE you, that’s why. They hate you and your pitiful excuse of an existence.


And THEN, even after you’ve spent 25 minutes PEERING AT A CARDBOARD BOX just because you’ll be rewarded with A SLIVER OF FUCKING CHOCOLATE THE SIZE OF A CHILD’S TOENAIL, you have to actually open the window. This involves witlessly scraping your fingernails across the cardboard for another 25 minutes like some sort of useless fucking dimwit chicken until you finally manage to prise it open. And THEN you have to break through the foil. And THEN you have to somehow get the chocolate OUT of the advent calendar which, in my experience, is a process that requires a combination of guile, brute strength and a full hour of tearful pleading.


And what are you rewarded with after all this, huh? A fucking molecule of chocolate, a full set of bleeding fingernails and - if you’ve got the Divine Fairtrade advent calendar - a patronising episodic retelling of the nativity story. “It all started 2000 years ago in the Holy Land,” it said on day one. “STOP TELLING ME THINGS I ALREADY KNOW, YOU MASSIVE COCKPUNCH” I shouted back at it.


Advent calendars make me scream swearwords at cardboard. For this reason more than anything else, I think I should probably hat them.
- Stuart Heritage