Scandinavian Christmas: Day 2

Welcome back to the 2nd day of Scandinavian Christmas!  Today we will be hearing from Mette, who blogs over at Erle Perle.  Mette is Danish and her blog is full of lovely photos, Scandinavian design, a and other awesome Scandinavian things like that. She also has an Etsy shop and you can follow her on Pinterest here.  This is Mette's first year participating in the Scandinavian Christmas series and I am so glad we get to hear all about advent from her today!



One of the most important traditions in our Danish family is the advent calender.

The advent calender counts down the days to Christmas from December 1st to Christmas Eve December 24th. You can get different kinds of calenders. Some take form as a large card with Christmas motifs and "windows". You open one "window" every day and find an image or perhaps a poem.

Some calenders contain chocolates and help you count down with a chocolate gift every day. The chocolate calender has always been an important tradition in our family. My mom buys a chocolate calender for all her grandchildren every year.

 Danish Television show different calenders on tv from December 1st - December 24th. We always watch one of them together in our home. It's a nice break.

This year our youngest daughter is staying in Idaho as an exchange student, so I'm exited to see, if Olivia (age 18) still want to watch the advent calenders on TV.

The most important calender is the gift calender. When our children were small they got a gift in their stocking every day, but now we have changed it to an advent calender counting the 4 advent Sundays.

This appliqued and embroidered calender is from my childhood. My parents hang up 24 small gifts for me - un-wrapped! I have photos, where I am eating the chocolate from the calender.

As you can see, there are many different kinds of advent calenders. It's very common to make advent calenders for adults too; and two years ago my husband made me a calender with 24 gifts. We usually make each other a calender with 4 advent Sunday gifts.

Finally and most importantly we have the calender light, as you can see, it helps you to count down too.

We always buy a large candle and this year it has neon pink numbers. This is everything about our advent calender tradition. I still need to decide how the advent wreath for this year will turn out. It's another important tradition.

Merry Christmas,

Mette


Thanks for sharing all about advent calendars, Mette! Ryan and I don't have one yet, but it's on my list of things to make for next Christmas.  I wish there was a TV show here in the US all about advent calendars, I will have to YouTube that. :) Be sure to come back tomorrow to hear from Astrid, she is sharing an adorable Scandinavian project she worked on this year.