Twenty-Four Tiny Drawers and One Very Tired Mum: Confessions of a Reusable Advent Calendar Dropout

It started, as these things so often do, with a photograph on Instagram. A wooden Advent calendar the size of a small dresser, twenty-four tiny drawers, a hand-stitched felt nativity arranged on top, and a caption that read “starting traditions ✨”. Reader, I ordered one. Not the £180 version. A £34 job from an online shop I have never been able to find again, which arrived in February and has lived in the loft ever since, quietly accumulating the sort of dust that only loft dust can achieve.

For eleven months it was a lovely idea. I pictured my children — now seven and four — grown and misty-eyed, unpacking it from its tissue paper and remembering the Christmases of their youth. I pictured a mantelpiece. I pictured myself, calm, holding a cup of tea, being the sort of woman who owns a glue gun.

The Dream Meets December

Then came the first of December, and with it the annual realisation that traditions require labour. At 11.12pm on 30 November I was crouched on the kitchen floor with a tub of Celebrations and a permanent marker, discovering two facts about my heirloom. First, the drawers are roughly three centimetres deep and shaped like a decorative thimble. Second, the numbers were hand-painted by someone with a very relaxed attitude to the number 6.

A single Celebrations chocolate does not fit in the drawer. It overhangs, like a guest who has stayed too long. So I did what any reasonable person does at midnight: I squashed them.

By day two, the four-year-old had worked out how the drawers open, and had therefore opened days two, three, four and a portion of nine. By day five, the drawer for the 5th was jammed. I freed it with a butter knife and a small amount of swearing, taking a chip of paint off the roof in the process. By day nine I had run out of Celebrations and started improvising — a wrapped mint from the glovebox, a stray chocolate coin, one sad purple Quality Street that nobody in this house has ever wanted.

The Felt Nativity Situation

I want to talk about the felt nativity, because nobody warned me. It came with eleven pieces: Mary, Joseph, a manger, a donkey, a sheep, and what I can only assume was intended to be an angel but looks like a small cushion in a hat.

The dog ate the sheep on day eleven. I replaced it with a folded piece of kitchen roll, which the children accepted without question, which tells you everything about the standards being applied here.

And then, somewhere between wrapping presents and the school nativity letter, drawer seventeen vanished. Not the chocolate — the drawer. I suspect it was pressed into service as a tiny garage for a Playmobil van, though the suspect has refused to comment. Day seventeen is now a hole. A small, square, very obvious hole, right at toddler eye level, which has prompted a criminal investigation that shows no sign of concluding before Christmas.

“Where’s day seventeen?” they ask, daily. “Is Father Christmas going to fix it?”

I have started saying “it’s a mystery” in a bright voice and moving the calendar two inches to the left.

In Defence of the £1.50 Cardboard Number

Here is the thing nobody says out loud: the supermarket calendar is fine. The Cadbury one, the one with a picture of a snowy robin on the front that costs less than a coffee. It goes up, it gets torn open, the chocolate is small and inoffensive, and the whole thing is in the recycling by the 27th. That is not a failure of parenting. That is a functioning system.

Nobody’s childhood memories hinge on the vessel. Ask any adult what they remember about Advent and they will say the chocolate, or the fight over who got the window with the star, or the year their brother ate all twenty-four in one sitting and had to be collected from a birthday party early. Not one person will say “the joinery”.

If You’re Already In Too Deep

For those of us who have committed — who have the wooden calendar, the felt donkey and the point of no return — a few practical notes.

• Fill it in one sitting. One podcast, one tub of chocolates, one glass of something. Do not attempt it nightly, because you will forget and there will be tears on the 14th.
• Keep a spare tub. A bag of Celebrations in the cupboard solves most Advent emergencies, including the “day seventeen is missing” problem, which can be resolved by declaring a Mystery Day and doubling up.
• Let go of the nativity. If a piece goes missing, replace it with anything. A button. A raisin. The children genuinely do not mind.
• Cost it honestly. A wooden calendar plus twenty-four fillings every year is not cheaper than four £1.50 calendars, however many times you tell yourself it is. It is a hobby, and hobbies cost money.
• Stop comparing. The mum on Instagram with handwritten activity cards in every drawer (“day 9: bake together!”) is not alright either. She is simply better at the photograph.

The Bit Where I Admit It

The calendar is still on the sideboard. Day seventeen is still missing. The kitchen roll sheep has been joined by a small, unexplained plastic dinosaur, which I have decided to interpret as a wise man.

And do you know what? The kids have had a lovely December. They have eaten substandard chocolate from a chipped wooden box and argued about whose turn it is. That is the tradition, in the end. Not the heirloom. The arguing.

Next year I am buying the £1.50 ones. Four of them. Two for the children, and two for me to eat in the cupboard, alone, in the manner of my ancestors.

The wooden calendar can go back in the loft. It has earned a rest — and so, frankly, have I.