Carina and the Advent Calender

This post is for my three-year-old God-Daughter, Carina, and to mark the beginning of advent. In this post I aim to recapture some of the magic I felt as a child in the run up to Christmas.

I remember a lot about Decembers as a child. I remember the diamond-paned windows in my bedroom frosting over with patterns of stars of ice which looked so beautiful yet as though they would cut you if you touched them. I breathed on the inside of my window and traced the shapes in the mist of my breath and when I returned after school they had evaporated. 

I remember looking out of our bathroom window over the fields a pale greenish white under a layer of frost. I remember how crunchy that frost was underfoot and I remember the anticipation of ice and cold as I stood in our dining room, being bundled up in scarves and hats and mittens, staring out at our garden path, ready to dash out in a second once I was deemed well enough protected from the elements.

 

I remember porridge with cream and brown sugar, and how I saw the daylight begin as I was eating my breakfast. Mainly, however, December was the month when I got to open my advent calendar. When did I first have an advent calendar? I don’t remember, yet it seems it was always there, as inevitable a sign of the changing seasons as the darker days and longer nights. 

The first advent calendar I remember was a large picture of a gorgeous redbrick town house set against a night time blue sky, cloudless and starry. As I opened the windows I revealed more stars, one of them a shooting star, so iridescent I still thrill at the memory. Years later as an A level student studying Blake I remembered that comet with clarity on reading the lines – 

‘when the stars threw down their spears, 

and watered heaven with their tears.’

    To me, the beauty and grandeur and awe of the advent calendar was captured in those two lines.   

I  remember  how sometimes I longed to open the next day’s window just to see what it would bring. Some windows excited me more than others, for inexplicable reasons. I would fix on a date….December 19th say, and stare at that window every day, desperate to open it, perhaps because it was one of the more obvious ones and  directly in front of me. Other windows were hidden, and I had to comb the whole page with my eyes, sometimes several times before the number would jump out and I would exclaim at my idiocy at not seeing it before. Every day I would open my advent calendar as soon as I came downstairs, to reveal bells, baubles, fairies, reindeer, wise men, and any other number of wonderful things, as the contents of the magical red brick town house were slowly revealed.

My father, a playwright, wrote a Christmas radio play for children one year, entitled Carol and the Advent Calendar. In this play, Carol,  waking late one night alone and cold,  is tempted into the wooden advent calendar which her father has made and her venture inside causes time to stand still. She fights an evil clock master who wishes to ban Christmas and helps Father Christmas to ensure the magic day  does dawn after all. I listened to a recording of this play every year…and I longed to climb into my advent calendar, however briefly, and  explore the land and rooms within. In Carol and the Advent Calendar Carol sings –

 ‘In those little windows, 

  all is warm and bright,

  I’d be safe within those

tiny, little rooms tonight’ 

Unlike the motherless Carol, I had nothing to run away from, no reason to long to disappear into the advent calendar except curiosity. Yet this did not stop me from peering through those little windows and wondering about the world beyond.

This year, my beautiful God Daughter. Carina, is turning three at the beginning of December. I think she is just  old enough to be excited by an advent calendar, even if her fingers are too childlike to prise open the windows. She  can still try and she can still watch the windows being opened by her mother, Kirsty. She is possibly old enough to begin to grasp the sense of anticipation which comes with an advent calendar too, the build up to Christmas and the way its closeness is marked every day with an image. 

This afternoon I am going out to buy Carina’s first advent calendar at Jenners, Edinburgh’s oldest, grandest, most beautiful department store. It is a golden sandstone building, strikingly similar in style to my old advent calendar, and at the moment, it too is filled with stars, paper cutout snowflakes and sparkly things (especially clothes and shoes, which are desperately tempting but sadly out of my reach). 

Found on google images, as all pictures in this article; This is the window of a toyshop in Chicago in the 1930s. I found it at once beautiful and slightly sinister, as all the best toys are. You have to believe they will come to life.

Grown up toys...I try not to linger too long in the make-up department

The toy department is  magical and I can still imagine the toys waiting until they are sure that the security guard has locked the front door for the night, before they come out to play at the designer makeup counters on the first floor.

I hope Carina loves her advent calendar and can imagine the world beyond the windows, one she can enter in her dreams, which causes her to long for  next morning, when she can open the next window,  which she has already probably traced and learnt the shape of with her fingers, guessing desperately at what could be behind it. 

A child's imagination makes the magic of Christmas real once again

On Boxing Day my calendar would be taken down from the wall and my mother would iron it under a towel, closing all the windows for another year. My red brick calendar lasted three years before disintegrating, and every year I would discover the windows anew. 

A wonderfully vintage looking advert for Jenners...it is in fact from 2008, but I love imagining that it is from the 1950s.

Now I'm off to Jenners to find the most beautiful advent calendar I can. Today is so clear that the sky above Jenners will be inky blue and starry by early evening, also we’ve had one or two meteorites lately. Maybe I am finally going through those little windows.