PASSIONATE RATIONS

Every year while we were stationed in Germany, my family attended one of the local Christmas bazaars.  There, amongst the particularly delightful bangles and baubles of German Christmas décor, were stacks and stacks of Advent calendars, one of which I would be allowed to take home.

An Advent calendar, as you may know, boasts twenty-four numbered windows, behind each of which lays a prize.   The “prize” can range from a simple picture, to toys, to—best of all—chocolate!  (My partner, though a German-American, apparently had no idea chocolate was an Advent-calendar option until I introduced one into our home several years ago, a situation that, in my opinion, requires a heart-to-heart talk with mom, who hails from Berlin).  Children open one calendar window each day, beginning on December 1^st, opening the last—and biggest—window twenty-four days later on Christmas Eve.  Each prize differs in size and shape from the others, so you never know just what you’ll get.   Such calendars thusly operate as devices of both keen pleasure and exquisite torture.  No doubt they were invented by an overwrought parent whose on-going threats regarding Santa Claus and coal simply were not working a month before Santa’s scheduled arrival.

Whatever the origin of the Advent calendar, I will never forget the just-before-bed joy of opening the window and seeing what shape of chocolate-goodness awaited me behind it, all the while getting closer and closer to the biggest prize of all—Christmas Eve and Christmas.  Undoubtedly, this process constituted my first lessons in that virtue known as patience.  But it also schooled me in the joy of small pleasures.

I think one of the things we lose along the way and to adulthood is the ability to experience great anticipation without inevitable anti-climax.  Perhaps that is because, too often, the window doesn’t open or no prize awaits us behind it.  Maybe that’s why, last year, I bought a permanent, wooden, advent calendar with twenty-four little drawers to fill with prizes.  My spouse will fill the even-numbered drawers for me and I, in turn, will fill the odd-numbered drawers (without going into why my spouse takes the “odd” ones; it’s certainly not because I’m even-keeled).  It’s a good way to remember the little gifts life gives us along the way, and the unmitigated, ineffable joy that was sometimes achievable, if only briefly, in childhood.  Or to hide coal….