A PARENT’S VIEW
HAS anyone else noticed that advent calendars are not what they used to be?
If I remember correctly, way back in the 1970s when I was a primary school kid, they were a fairly modest affair.
I think it was a couple of sheets of quite thin cardboard with 24 mediocre drawings of a vaguely religious, or at least festive, nature. Things have changed a lot. The first thing that many parents realise is that kids absolutely refuse to grow out of them and are astounded if it is suggested that they shouldn’t have advent calendars well into their early twenties.
I don’t have a problem with that and may well join in the fun this year by get- ting myself one!
But how shall I choose? Have you seen the enormous range on offer?
I recently did some research for a post on my blog on ideas for teen advent calendars and I was staggered by the variety that is now available.
There’s the predictable chocolate varieties but there are also gin, wine and cheese (yes, actual cheese) calendars as well. The most unexpected one was a pork scratching advent calendar.
If you want to avoid food all together, there are several calendars based on toiletries and, if the online financial gurus are to be believed, these can offer great value for money. They do, however, tend to sell out in mid-October so I’m already too late for that.
Then there are the kit-type calendars where you can build things like a transistor radio from scratch using the 24 pieces.
To avoid waste, you could always buy a re-usable one made of wood, cardboard or fabric and buy little gifts (and many of them are very little) to put in them every year. This will either be a complete joy or a total pain in the neck, depending on how stressed you feel at the time.
There are not many educational advent calendars, but parents are a resourceful bunch and I’ve found some very imaginative advent ‘book piles’ where 24 books of decreasing size are wrapped in green tissue paper and arranged to look like a Christmas tree – albeit a rather flat one!
I also love the idea of a reverse advent calendar where you choose a gift for a charity on each day of advent and then donate it on Christmas Eve. I think that’s the one for me.
Dr Sharon Parry is a mother of three and a former public health research fellow. She shares useful tips and her experiences of having three daughters in school and university in Wales on her website www.aftertheplayground.com