I love a countdown.
Every year when we were kids, my grandmother would buy my cousins and brothers and I one of those imported-from-Germany, chocolate-filled advent calendars - the kind where you pop open a little cardboard window for every day in December.
It was my favorite part of the holiday season.
I still love an advent calendar, and this year, Alice is old enough to look forward to the ritual of counting down days until Christmas. I sewed pouches out of some scrap fabric to make the simple advent calendar strung under our mantel. Each pouch is filled with a piece of chocolate or a couple of stickers or some other trinket - and her excitement at opening a new one each day makes a tiny surprise seem like a treasure.
Does your family keep an advent calendar? A new one every year or a much-loved heirloom that's carefully taken out of storage each December?
No advent calendar? Well, the month may be half over, but I say it's not too late. Starting tomorrow gives you a nice 10-day countdown, after all, which sounds perfectly fun to me.
P.S. Oh, man. I'm feeling really bad about the unexpected and unexplained break from posting. Here's my excuse: We're expecting another baby! (Talk about a countdown). I'm over the moon about it, of course, but those early months took a lot out of me. Feeling better now, though, so here's to the return of energy.
