The Tradition Of The Advent

Calendars And Candles

Advent can be ticked down in various methods, which are a calendar or candles. Calendars are used in a variety of ways in different countries. The most typical ones in the United Kingdom and the United States are made of paper or cards and have 24 or 25 little windows.

Every December, a Christmas scene is exhibited beneath an open window each day. German protestant Christians in the 19th century started counting to Christmas by drawing 24 chalk lines on a door and scratching one off each day in December.

Paper calendars became widespread in Germany in the early 1900s, but folks had made their own since the 1850s. It’s debatable when and where the first surplus calendar was printed. However, it was in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Gerhard Lang, a German printer, was perhaps the most popular and successful early creator of printed Advent calendars. His early calendars had two sheets: a ‘back’ piece of paper with the numerals 1 to 24 imprinted on it – the second sheet of pictures that you could cut out and paste on the numbers each day.