Advent calendars

Any one else have one? Mine is a card from my parents which is also a calender. Today I got a picture of a little tree in a pot. What did others get?


(P.S If this is in the wrong place or is a duplicate, mods may delete/move)

I got one with pictures of cats.  I love cats.

This is fun! For as long as I can remember my family's always done advent, and there's this certain tradition that some family and old friends always do, called an advent garden, where there's a spiral of greenery with things like shells or crystals on it, and an older girl dressed as an angel comes and lights the candle in the center and then hands out apples with little candles in them to the little kids, and they go down the spiral, light their candle and place it somewhere amidst the greenery...this year my aunt asked me to be the angel, so that was sweet.
We don't buy new advent calendars anymore because we have so many old ones with the windows still on, so this year we've got an old one from when I was about eight with St. Nick feeding animals. Today was a little chipmunk eating a nut.
I like the idea of one with cats!

Tim - I like cats
Andrea - I love Advent too! You and Tim both have ones with animals in!

Today I got a little cracker.

Yeah, cats are great.

Today I got a little cracker.

A cracker? As in an edible snack cracker? That's a bit unusual...
Today I got a rabbit eating a carrot...above the window was the rabbit sans the carrot.
I wonder if the Romanovs at all celebrated advent, or perhaps Alix did in Hesse as a little girl. I tried to find some pictures of Edwardian advent calendars, to no avail.

Today I got a little cracker.

A cracker? As in an edible snack cracker? That's a bit unusual...
Today I got a rabbit eating a carrot...above the window was the rabbit sans the carrot.
I wonder if the Romanovs at all celebrated advent, or perhaps Alix did in Hesse as a little girl. I tried to find some pictures of Edwardian advent calendars, to no avail.

Andrea, I meant a Christmas cracker, like the thing that you pull and it goes bang?
 http://www.whychristmas.com/cultures/russia.shtml
After a little googling I came up with the above link which gave very interesting info on Russian Christmas. Hope this helps!

Oh, I see what you mean about the cracker now. Here in the US we call them firecrackers, usually.
Cool link! Wierd that the Babushka story was written by an American...
I looked up German advent traditions just to see if Germans celebrated it, and it turns out that Advent calendars originated in Germany...
From a website with an article about that:
The German Advent calendar tradition goes back to the 19th century when children would draw Christmas pictures on 24 pieces of paper and hang them in the house. In the 1880s the wife of a German pastor crafted small Christmas boxes (Schachteln) for her impatient son to open on each day leading up to Christmas. Each box was filled with a delicious cookie and Gerhard was allowed to open one each day and eat the cookie inside. By 1903 or 1904, Gerhard Lang, as a partner in Reichhold & Lang in Munich, was manufacturing the first commercial illustrated Advent calendars (without cookies). The first calendars with fold-out windows appeared in 1920. Since the 1940s, Stuttgart's Sellmer Verlag has specialized in diorama calendars that display Christmas village scenes. The first chocolate-filled Advent calendars were being marketed as early as 1958.
So Alix wouldn't have had an advent calendar as a girl but perhaps the drawings...I can totally picture the little Hesses, when May was still alive, drawing Christmas pictures and hanging them up.

Oh, I see what you mean about the cracker now. Here in the US we call them firecrackers, usually.
Cool link! Wierd that the Babushka story was written by an American...
I looked up German advent traditions just to see if Germans celebrated it, and it turns out that Advent calendars originated in Germany...
From a website with an article about that:
The German Advent calendar tradition goes back to the 19th century when children would draw Christmas pictures on 24 pieces of paper and hang them in the house. In the 1880s the wife of a German pastor crafted small Christmas boxes (Schachteln) for her impatient son to open on each day leading up to Christmas. Each box was filled with a delicious cookie and Gerhard was allowed to open one each day and eat the cookie inside. By 1903 or 1904, Gerhard Lang, as a partner in Reichhold & Lang in Munich, was manufacturing the first commercial illustrated Advent calendars (without cookies). The first calendars with fold-out windows appeared in 1920. Since the 1940s, Stuttgart's Sellmer Verlag has specialized in diorama calendars that display Christmas village scenes. The first chocolate-filled Advent calendars were being marketed as early as 1958.
So Alix wouldn't have had an advent calendar as a girl but perhaps the drawings...I can totally picture the little Hesses, when May was still alive, drawing Christmas pictures and hanging them up.

Ah, I see. Firecrackers is a cool name!
It's interesting about the cookie, I'd like one in my advent calender everyday!
Yes, the little Hesse children would have loved colouring little pictures...it would be amazing if any had survived!

I got a picture of a little yellow lantern today and a green (?!) candy cane yesterday.