This year, on top of helping the duck and me impress others by always knowing the date and, after some slow math, how many days we have to wait until it’s Christmas, our Advent calendar can also be upgraded: By adding a few more treats ourselves it can be used as an end-of-2020-calendar. Isn’t that great?! We’ll start looking for tea bags to add to one of our tea Advent calendars tomorrow! While 2021 will likely continue where 2020 left off it does have a more optimistic outlook, don’t you think? 
The Advent calendar that the duck is posing with in today’s photo is actually from 2019 when we received it as a gift but decided to hold on to it until this year since we had already bought ourselves another tea calendar and thought that having two different tea varieties to try every day was a bit too exciting for us to handle (little did we know that we’d be given two more tea Advent calendars this year. What to do?). Despite all that tea the duck and I actually are considering getting an additional non-tea Advent calendar, especially since we’re not crazy and energetic enough to do a blog Advent calendar as we did last year (not a fresh one, anyway).
We’ve gone through quite a few interesting Advent calendars throughout the years. And that is exactly what we want to write about today:
Our favorite Advent calendars – past, present, and future
If you’ve read about the duck and my love of tea, it should not surprise you that a tea Advent calendar has somewhat become a staple. There’s not much that could beat a mystery cup (or three) of tea in the evening. We’ve had so many Advent calendar cups of tea that we loved but just as many that we had trouble finishing. It kind of feels a bit like trying new Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans in liquid form every day, though none of the tastes are actually objectively disgusting; they just appear to be to the duck and my very particular taste buds. Still (or because of that?), tea Advent calendars are, wings down, our favorites!
Now let’s travel to the past: Out of all the Advent calendars we’ve had, the one that left us with the most vivid memory was a gift we had received when we were living in Japan. The calendar had a pretty picture on it, was compact, and featured an even more compact snack: chocolate-covered raisins. The raisins came covered with white, milk, and dark chocolate, and a few had rum added to them. When we opened the first door on December 1st, the duck and I had a very long chuckle as we discovered that, basically, we had gotten an Advent calendar that held exactly 24 raisins: one per day! But we were wrong. See, in the morning of December 24th, hours before we were going to take the beautiful work of art that is the expressive phone snapshot called “Christmas Eve in Yokohama,” when we opened the last door of our Advent calendar we were greeted by not one, not two, but three(!) different chocolate-covered raisins. How would we ever be able to finish them all?
Seriously, though, this really was one of the duck and my absolute favorite (non-tea) Advent calendars because it made us smile every time we could devour another whole(!) gourmet chocolate-covered raisin. This shows that you don’t always have to buy super extravagant Advent calendars to make someone happy; sometimes a small one that perfectly suits the giftee’s sense of humor is all you need.
Let’s get to the one Advent calendar that the duck and I want to get in the future, at a time when, hopefully, we won’t move as much anymore. You might remember that, last year, the duck and I mentioned that we love looking at Playmobil Advent calendars and that, fortunately, we don’t ever buy them because we would have to move with them. Well, this one definitely tops the townhouse one that we fell in love with last year. The duck and I would forget about our stinginess in an instant if it meant that we could decorate our (more) permanent (than now) home with some of our favorite scenes from Back to the Future! Hopefully, this calendar will not be out of stock by the time we have decided that having to move with it should not prevent us from getting this awesome calendar anyway.
There’s another Advent calendar that the duck and I still have vivid nightmares memories of: Last year’s one-blog-post-a-day Advent calendar! By now, fortunately, we have given in to our laziness so that we will definitely stick to our current schedule of not-a-blog-post-every-day. It is nice to think about how naive and optimistic we all were last year, though, so I think that I might link back to our crazy December 2019 endeavor this December, kind of like a fun little memory of ‘the good old days’… we’ll see. I don’t even know what the duck and I are up to these days.
What do you think of Advent calendars? Will you have one this year?
The Duck in... side 