It’s a snowy fairytale outside, the tear-off calendar is completely empty, we live full of New Year's worries and preparing gifts for "under the tree". This year, children presented the Advent calendar. Unlike Europeans and Americans we do not have the tradition to please our relatives and friends with small gifts during the period of several weeks before holiday.
Advent (from the Latin . Adventus - coming) - the expectation of Christmas (or New Year ). The history suggests that the calendar was invented not so long ago, in the late XIX century, in Germany. And there certainly was a place for a kid with million of question. Frau Lang was exhausted by her son Gerhard, who asked every day when Christmas comes? She gave up and made him a cardboard with windows - Calendar with number of days left before Christmas. Gerhard was allowed to open only one window a day – and he found a cookie in tat window. So he could see himself how many cookies still needed to be eaten before the holiday, how many days left. By the way, when the boy grew up, his mother's invention began bringing him a profit: he began to produce the world's first Advent calendars - boxes with windows, which hid not cookies, but candies.
Now the “salesmen of Happiness" offer a variety of options: Calendars with 30 and 15 days, with boxes and bags, socks and gloves, made in a shape of candies, gnomes, letters, houses and authentic villages. There are calendars-trains and calendars-posters . I’ve got the one with numbered green and red bags . At first it was quite unusual to start getting Christmas presents from December, 1 but every day the curiosity and expectation of holiday was appearing more often. And you can not imagine that happiness brought by those small gifts. These are the best cure from December depression. But the most rewarding was the fact that each bag had the figure of an owl that I am collecting . Now I know for sure : next December I will get my grandchildren the Advent -calendar.
N.Elizarova
