In French stores, have you noticed this great novelty: the reusable and customizable advent calendar?
If you’ve succumbed to this new fashion for the customizable advent calendar… well BRAVO, you’ve simply become German.
Because this way of doing things is quite simply what has been done in Germany since the advent of the advent calendar in the 19th century.
At that time, Moselle and Alsace were German, that’s why you have the impression of doing it for much longer than France from the inside.
In the 19th century, children were already too impatient!
The idea was invented in Maulbronn in Baden-Württemberg (it is only a hundred kilometers from Bitche).
At the end of the 19th century, a pastor’s wife was fed up with seeing the children grow impatient at the beginning of December.
She therefore had the idea of taking a cardboard box and making 24 small holes in order to hang Christmas cupcakes in front of each day.
The tradition of Christmas cupcakes dates back to the 16th century.
The idea is fabulous and will spread throughout Germany with always the same philosophy: you make your calendar yourself and you put what you want in it to please your loved ones.
Usually 24 bags filled with a number on them are hung throughout the living room.
In France, the advent calendar appears in the 1950s : we buy them already ready-made with chocolates in them.
In Germany, too, the industry offers ready-made calendars, but it doesn’t work as well as homemade ones.
In France, we have the impression that it is recent but in Germany it has been done for more than a century.