Advent calendars are a nightmare when you’re divorced. The kids come back from their other house with days’ worth of unopened Toblerone, which is funny and delicious, after, say, eight years, but tear-jerkingly poignant when the split is very fresh. So, ages ago, I took matters into my own hands, as there was a very real risk I was going to put everyone off Toblerone. I got some little DIY advent kits from Sainsbury’s, thinking I could only fill the days when they’d wake up with me, and they wouldn’t be faced with a sad backlog.
That didn’t work for my youngest, who said the main upside of having divorced parents was that you got two of everything. So I moved on to filling all the drawers, but not necessarily with sweets. That coincided with a year I wasn’t that busy with work and whatnot, and I went all out. If you can name a miniature thing, it went in a drawer; tiny tape measures, minuscule note-writing sets, ceramic kittens, lip balm. An overload of cuteness. That didn’t work for my eldest, who said the pressure of how much sheer appreciation I was expecting every morning was putting him off his breakfast. I said: “Is it me, though? Or is it that you’re full of Lindt pistachio truffle?” And he said: “No, it’s definitely you.”
The last few years have been chaos. It’s actually really hard to find 24 things that are small enough. Things that are delightful to a 10-year-old – stamps in the shape of squirrels, rubbers in the shape of rockets – hold no interest at all for late-stage teenagers, but nothing they do like (Smirnoff, K-pop) would fit in a drawer. Really, the only person who is still invested in the ritual is me, but letting it drop would be to admit the inexorable passage of time, which I’m not prepared to do.
Yet I’m not so heavily invested that I do it properly, and I only realised this morning that it was even December. It’s not as ruinous as the time I let loose galloping tooth fairy inflation because I realised at midnight I had nothing smaller than a tenner. But it’s in that ballpark.