It comes in all sorts of forms and variations. Whether digital, made of paper, as a candle, chocolate and toy calendar or even as a whole house, whose windows each represent a door. Advent calendars are indispensable in today's Christmas season and not only sweetens the waiting time until Christmas Eve, but also serves as a counter and timer.
The origin of the Advent calendar itself can be traced back to the 19th century. In 1838, Johann Heinrich Wichern (director of the Protestant boys' rescue home in Hamburg) developed an idea to represent the remaining days until Christmas Eve. He assembled an Advent wreath from a wagon wheel, a wooden wreath, 20 small red candles and four large white candles. But other forms and variations of the Advent calendar also became popular. For example, some families hung 24 pictures on the wall or drew 24 chalk marks on the wall or door, which the children were allowed to wipe away day by day. Towards the end of the 1940s, the Advent candle also became more popular and at the same time represented a Scandinavian tradition in which a candle was only allowed to burn down to the next mark each day.
In 1902, the Protestant bookseller Friedrich Trümpler in Hamburg published the first printed calendar in the form of a Christmas clock with the numbers 13 - 24 on the dial. It was not until twenty years later that such clocks with 24 fields appeared. In 1903, however, the Munich publisher Gerhard Lang also brought a printed calendar with the title "Im Lande des Christkinds" on the market. This consisted of 2 sheets. From one sheet, readers could cut out 24 pictures, which they could glue onto the second sheet. Such mundane calendars had their heyday in the 20s by all kinds of authors and were only replaced by the so-called "Erika calendar", which showed modern motives such as railroads, cars, airplanes or even traffic policemen. After the 20s, more and more calendars were distributed, whose doors could be opened and showed different pictures. In the 1930s, the Reichhold & Lang lithographic institute in Munich produced the first types of the chocolate Advent calendar we know today.
In 1946, Richard Sellmer produced the international calendar "Die kleine Stadt" ("The Little Town"), which was available not only in German, but also in English and Swedish. He tried to market this calendar at the Frankfurt Fair, especially to US-Americans, and thus set a milestone for international marketing. Between 1946 and 1998 alone, Sellmer produced over 230 different designs for Advent calendars, especially for the American market.
Nowadays, behind most of the doors of purchased products, you can often find, in addition to pictures, pieces of chocolate in various forms and also toys. But also homemade calendars with small gifts, which can be packaged in a variety of ways and crafted in a variety of forms, are becoming increasingly popular.