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Chez Larsson

Making a home in Stockholm, one drawer at a time

The advent calendar

He is seventeen and does not need one. He is getting one.

Seventeen years old, does not need an advent calendar, does not expect an advent calendar. Getting an advent calendar.

I am not saying what is in it. One clue: everything is flat this year.

Numbered white envelopes standing in a green glass container

What it is

Twenty-four numbered white envelopes. Twenty-four rather than twenty-five, because Christmas here is celebrated on Christmas Eve, standing upright in an old refrigerator storage container.

There is a letter opener in with them, which sounds like a fussy detail and is not. Nobody wants to tear an envelope carefully at seven in the morning.

Sheets of printed numbers taped to a window, reversed

The numbers

Printed 0 to 9 in a heavy sans face across three sheets of paper.

Taped to a window, reverse side out. That is the whole trick: the window is the lightbox, and working from the back means you trace the mirror image, so when the cut-out is turned over the pencil line is on the underside and does not show.

Tracing a number through the paper against the daylight from the window

Trace onto the backs of scraps, whatever is in the drawer: craft paper, leftover gift wrap, offcuts. No two numbers match that way.

A cut-out number two beside a glue stick on a white envelope

Then cut them all out, which took one evening in front of the television, and glue them on with a glue stick.

One to twenty-four.