Countdowns are exciting, right? Whether it's the ball dropping at midnight on New Year's Eve, the final seconds on the Super Bowl scoreboard, or opening little doors for twenty four days in December, there's something about ticking down toward culmination that is inherently satisfying. My first advent calendar memory is making one for my boyfriend when I was a new adult. I painstakingly cut out tiny holiday images from the grainy, quickly fading construction paper of our era. Pinterest, Instagram, and Tik-Tok weren't even gleams in their inventors' frontal lobes at the time, so I had to figure out how to create a Christmas-tree shaped template to line up the openable windows and the base paper beneath it. I Elmer's Glued tiny clumps of holly into one square, then a drum, wreath, and snowman into their own spaces. Santa was placed in the final box, because that was who advented for me then. I cut out more paper to decorate the front piece, pasting on ornaments ...
