Advent calendars have become a Christmas tradition, bringing lots of excitement to adults and kids alike while helping to count down the days until Christmas. There is now a wide variety of advent calendars to our delight offering many different products and entertainment such as cheese, wine, beauty products, chocolate, tea, toys and even escape game puzzles. But how did it all start?
From the early nineteenth century, German Protestants began to mark the days of Advent either by burning a candle for the day or, more simply, marking walls or doors with a line of chalk each day.
German-born Gerhard Lang is considered to be the producer of the first printed Advent calendar in the early 1900s. Lang was a little boy when his mother made him a calendar with 24 small candies attached to cardboard, one for each day before Christmas. He grew up to operate the Reichhold & Lang printing company where he printed the first Advent cardboard calendar with 24 little pictures. A few years later, the company printed the first calendar with the little doors that everyone now loves to open today. Lang’s business closed shortly before the outbreak of World War II. Subsequently, cardboard was rationed and with a Nazi ban on the printing of calendars with images, the calendars disappeared and might have been gone forever.
However, after the war ended Richard Sellmar of Stuttgart miraculously (considering the paper shortages) obtained a permit from US officials to begin printing and selling the calendars again. Advent calendars filled with chocolate began to appear in the late 1950s, and it was around this time that they also began to spread across the globe. President Eisenhower is sometimes credited with the American popularization of advent calendars having been photographed while opening them with his grandchildren. Today advent calendars are a worldwide phenomenon, even seeing a boost in popularity in recent years. But at their heart, advent calendars retain the essence of counting down the days to Weihnachten that began with those simple chalk scratches.