When I was small, we were only allowed paper advent calendars featuring religious tableaux. Stables in Bethlehem; cathedrals. That sort of thing.
Picture the Dickensian scene: my siblings and I would excitedly rush to the kitchen every morning to open our little window and find a mere picture of dove or an angel. It was only when I went to boarding school that the thrilling world of chocolate advent calendars was revealed because pupils would give them to one another, although I was a greedy teenager and had usually eaten all my chocolates by the third day of December.
These days, advent calendars have almost nothing to do with Advent and quite a lot to do with bath oil and mini bottles of perfume. Liberty opened the waiting list for their much-feted advent calendar in July; it costs £275 this year and contains items including an eye cream and a La Mer lip balm. Very holy. But it’s not just beauty advent calendars now. Paxton and Whitfield are offering a cheese advent calendar and Fortnum’s is flogging a Scotch whisky advent calendar. You can buy pork crackling advent calendars, and advent calendars stuffed with jam miniatures, and coffee. You can buy advent calendars for your pets. Although first prize for the advent calendar least likely to get the Archbishop of Canterbury’s approval should probably go to LoveHoney’s £79 ‘Enjoy Advent Calendar’, which includes intimate items best left to your imagination, and some wipes. Tis the season to be hygienic, everyone!
We have the Germans to thank for the practice of counting down the days until Christmas. They started it in the 19thcentury, marking the days off on the wall or a religious picture with chalk. Hey presto: 120 years or so later we can now celebrate the approach of the birth of Christ with a bedroom accessory. Honestly, isn’t December tiring enough already?
Paper, I strongly believe, remains the most charming option. You can find pretty, inexpensive ones featuring shepherds and Wise Men and so on via a company called, appropriately, Traditional Advent Calendars. Alternatively, you can find quite posh paper advent calendars on stately home websites. The Chatsworth website has a one of the house all decorated for Christmas. Blenheim has another, featuring the palace covered in snow. The brilliant cartoonist Alison Gardiner has done one of Highgrove featuring a labrador and a pheasant. I don’t imagine either of those were in Bethlehem, but painted animals — in my honest opinion — are more festive than body creams and furry handcuffs.
Country Life's annual (paper) Advent Calendar issue is on sale for one week only, from November 26.
-
Dangerous beasts (and where to find them): Britain's animals that are best left aloneJohn Lewis-Stempel provides a miscellany of our otherwise benign land’s more fearsome critters.
-
The Rococo jewel nestled into vineyard terraces that's a visual index of 'a king’s Enlightenment belief in knowledge, cultivation and the civilising power of Nature'A summer picnic in 1743 prompted Frederick the Great to create a retreat for himself outside his capital at Berlin. The result was the creation of Schloss Sanssouci in Brandenburg, as Aoife Caitríona Lau explains.
-
'People always think that, working on The Telegraph, I'll be told that things aren't right wing enough. But in 37 years, I've never, ever been told that’: The Telegraph’s cartoonist Matt on his consuming passionsThe Daily Telegraph cartoonist Matt — AKA Matthew Pritchett — talks to Lotte Brundle about his career as a cartoonist, his love of Snoopy and how he ‘stole’ his wife from Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen.
-
William Hanson's 39 steps to being a gentlemanMany have attempted to update the codes of gentlemanly conduct for 2025, but as, William Hanson shows, the timeless rules are still the best ones
-
Do you really want that Friday feeling? Tradition says it was the day Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, Noah’s flood started and Christ was crucifiedBefore you shout 'TGIF', steady on, warns Ian Morton. Friday has a reputation — and it's not a good one.
-
Bunny Mellon: The Truman Capote ‘Swan’, muse and horticulturalist whose creations for The White House were recently lost foreverAs Tiffany & Co. pay homage to Bunny Mellon with a new Bird on a Rock collection, Owen Holmes takes a look at the most iconic garden designs of this heiress-horticulturist, from her Virginia estate to the White House to Versailles.
-
'Never has there been a more important time to publicise great Victorian and Edwardian buildings in peril': The importance of saving our historic buildingsFor the 16th year, the Victorian Society is calling on the public to nominate Victorian or Edwardian buildings in England and Wales that are in need of saving.
-
‘Pope Paul V remains a popular effigy today, and gets blown up in Lewes most years’: A five minute guide to England’s wackiest Bonfire Night celebrationsThe market town of Lewes in East Sussex has not one, not two, but seven bonfire societies and its celebrations have been labelled the ‘only proper Guy Fawkes night left’.
-
A handful of Scotland's last available freshwater pearls have been transformed into 'mesmerising' pieces of jewelleryEdinburgh jeweller Hamilton & Inches have been trusted to handle the incredibly rare organic gemstones.
-
Amelia Thomas: The woman who learned to talk to animalsAmelia Thomas, the real-life Dr Dolittle who spent years decoding how animals talk, joins James Fisher on the Country Life podcast.
