The Cardboard Advent Calendar

The cardboard Advent calendar is a stiff printed panel with twenty-four doors cut into its face, each numbered in gold or red, the doors set into a painted village of snow-roofed houses with a church steeple above them. A sled waits on the hill behind the houses; a pair of mittens hangs on a fencepost. Every door is a window or a piece of the sky, and opening one takes a single day out of December.

The panel is a printed sheet glued to a thicker gray board, and the doors are made by a die that stamps the entire sheet at once: three sides cut clean through, the fourth scored shallow so the door folds rather than tears. The numbers are printed, and a line of glitter is pressed into the ink while it is still wet. Some boards carry a loop of string at the top to hang by; others have a tab cut into the back panel to stand them upright on a counter. From the first door opened, a few flecks of glitter come off on the fingers; the rest works loose across the month and ends up in the carpet.

The form is German. It grew out of nineteenth-century homes where December was counted in chalk marks on the door frame, and a publisher in the early nineteen-hundreds put that count into print: a board, a number, a door, a picture behind it. American houses took up the same board and kept the counting. December is the only month that delivers its days this way, one perforated square at a time.

The board hangs by tape from a doorframe in the kitchen. It is worked first thing in the morning, before the lights are on; the hand that opens the doors is a child's hand. The door does not give easily — the scored fold resists, then lets go all at once with a small dry crack. Behind it is a square of the same printed village that the closed door was hiding: a sled, a star, a snowman, a pair of mittens. The kind with chocolate holds one piece in a cardboard cell behind each door; the plain kind opens onto its picture alone.

By the second week the board shows its month. The dry heat of the room has curled the bottom corners forward. The tape has stretched, so the board hangs slightly crooked. A door pushed shut at breakfast hangs open again by supper; cardboard keeps the fold it has been given. The early doors, opened and pressed back day after day, are creased white along the hinge. Around the third week one door is missing entirely, torn off at the perforation, and the square of village it covered is gone with it.

The doors that have not been opened lie flush against the board, glitter intact, their numbers reading off the mornings that remain: 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24. On the morning of the twenty-fourth, the last door is opened. On some boards it is the largest door, cut to cover the church or shaped as a star, and behind it sits the stable that the village has been pointing toward all month. The early doors fold back flat against the board; the last door stands open.