THE ADVENT CALENDAR
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My mother went artsy-crafty project-seismic every Christmas. She sewed holiday placemats and tablecloths, trimming them with festive ball fringe. She knitted red and green Christmas stockings for her kids, grands, nieces, nephews, even the offspring of cherished family friends.
Her signature holiday outfit — worn with pride to every December soiree — was a home-made hand-stitched full-length Mrs. Santa dress fashioned in red velvet, trimmed with fake white fur and cinched by a wide black belt. (SO embarrassing when I was 14.)
Craftswoman to her core, Mom’s Yuletide season simmered with more creativity than Picasso’s atelier. But to me her masterpiece was the family advent calendar — a colorful red and green 2’x4’ fabric banner featuring the ribboned outline of a Christmas tree, below which were little pockets numbered 1 through 24. She’d stick a memento of our year into each daily slot — ticket stubs to “The Mikado,” a bronze Brownie pin, an Eastern Airlines boarding pass to Miami. Voila! Our year in review.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the Scotch Pine. When my kids were toddlers, I decided to create an advent calendar for them, just like the one Mom made for us so many years ago. So I sat down at my Singer and created my version in calico. I ransacked the house looking for mementoes — a miniature soccer ball, a U.S. Open tennis tournament stub, a small photo of them in Halloween finery, a teacher’s warning note about a sinking math grade. Every morning at breakfast, Alex and Chris took turns and pulled out the day’s memory and pinned it to calendar.
Somehow, through household moves over the decades, I lost track of that advent calendar. So it was quite a surprise to walk into my son’s house in Ridgewood, New Jersey last week and see IT hanging on the kitchen wall. “I found the calendar a few years ago in your Christmas decorations,” Chris told me. “And I knew I wanted it for my boys.”
I immediately recognized the colorful calico field accented with a green-ribboned outline of old Tannenbaum. I looked at the numbers, so cleanly and precisely cut, making me wonder if my gnarly arthritic fingers could do that today. (Not a chance.) But the best was watching 13-year-old Henry, his father’s son from tousled hair down to sneakered feet, pull out that Saturday’s treasure: a scissored section of the program for the Spring orchestra concert at George Washington Middle School in which Henry played the violin. OMG.
Other items hanging on their advent tree include a Webhannet Golf Club scorecard from a 9-hole match here in Maine with my son and his two sons last August. There was an admission ticket to Take Flight in Kittery where the boys had gone zip-lining, and another from a West Point football game where the family had tail-gated before cheering for Army. Voila! Their year in review.
It’s still hard to believe that my mother died 28 years ago. Rarely a day goes by when I don’t recall her fabulous wit and creative fervor, her fierce love for and protection of her four kids, her passion for learning … and yes, even in that gaudy Mrs. Santa dress, her signature style. Those memories heightened when I spotted the legacy of her best Christmas creation ever: the Advent Calendar.
Wouldn’t she love to know it’s a tradition lovingly and enthusiastically carried on by her grandson Chris. Oh, yes!
