... during Christmas time

23 days until Christmas Eve 

(here in Austria we celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve)!

24 days are a long time especially for kids so traditionally children get some sort of calendar to count down the 24 days until Christmas. This calendar is called “Adventkalender” and it is the best idea ever.

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You can buy them in stores and the have different fillings. You can get them filled with:

• pictures
• ordinary chocolate
• special chocolate like Kinder Überraschung
• Lego figures
• teabags
• etc.

I am an only child and my mum is the best so I got a self-made Adventkalender. She got 24 things for me, like tea or chocolate, wrapped these and put them into a little blue basket. During my school years I always got up easily during Christmas time because there was always a wonderful surprise hidden inside the package.

Because my mum is the best mum in the world I still get my basket of parcels each year!

This year they were too big for the little blue basket so I got a bigger blue box. Getting up today was easy even with fog and hardly any daylight outside my window because there was a surprise waiting for me.

For two years now I made my mum an Adventkalender as well. It started in 2009 when we talked about first sentences in books and I told her I only know the first one of Anna Karenina from Leo Tolstoy. She wasn’t sure if she knows any so I made her 24 cards with first sentences of books either she or I had at that time and each morning she hunted down the book and never failed. Last year making these 24 cards was so much fun because I had to find books I hadn’t used the year before and I also wanted to find first sentences that gave no explicit hint to the book, like the name of the protagonist or something like this.

This year it took me nearly two hours to find 24 books with 24 new first sentences but I succeeded and today she found this sentence on her card:

“Some things start before other things”

This is a rather easy one to start with. It is the beginning of Terry Pratchett’s “The Wee Free Men”!

Hopefully she will enjoy this year’s beginnings as well because I am sure I will enjoy each one of my parcels.  

Oh, by the way, she wrapped all parcels in Winnie Pooh wrapping paper. Winnie Pooh is my hero. Forget Batman, Spiderman and the other loser. Winnie Pooh for the win!