Clodagh Finn: Life feels like an Advent calendar as we mark time and ration treats

Waiting, counting, and living for treats sum up the reality of our lives since March 2020, writes Clodagh Finn

The realities of our new pandemic world have already begun to shape the countdown to Christmas. File image.

Is there a better metaphor for the way we are living our Covid-restricted lives than the Advent calendar? Indeed, at times, it seems like we are trapped in one; marking time and measuring out daily treats as we trudge onwards in the hope of better days.

What will be behind the perforated cardboard window today? Playdate or pantomime? Socially-distanced contact with a friend? Hairdressers or gym?

During this time of waiting, not all of the daily deliveries are pleasant. Ten days ago, how many of us knew that the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet was Omicron? Now, the letter might feature in one calendar window explaining that O-micron means little ‘o’ (as opposed to O-mega, or big ‘o’), while a second window tells us how to pronounce it.

Is it Oh-MY-cron or OH-mi-cron? We could spend an Advent day in debate.

That is not quite as fanciful as it seems, because the realities of our new pandemic world have already begun to shape the countdown to Christmas.

Last year, for instance, Living Advent Calendars became a thing as communities in Britain turned the windows of their homes into bright echoes of the squares on wall calendars.

Thanks so much @itvlondon for having our Living Advent Calendar on the show tonight. Some very excited children buzzing around the house now! 🎄🎅⭐️ pic.twitter.com/7RoiTcgPhC

— MHC_UK (@MHC_UK) November 25, 2020

One window was revealed on the first day of Advent — which traditionally falls on the fourth Sunday before Christmas — and then, day by day, others unveiled their festive displays in the run-up to December 25. An uplifting twist on a tradition that is becoming ever more commercial.

Having said that, is it not celebratory (and harmless) to hang a calendar full of chocolate and release one from its dark hiding place on each day of December?

The memory of those childhood surprises still sharpens my sense of anticipation at this time of year. 

Christmas advent calendar. Picture: iStock

I’m tempted to relive it now, but I know, in my heart of hearts, that a chocolate Advent calendar wouldn’t last candlelight in my house. I’d be into the middle of next week before December 1 was out. One chocolate is never enough, is it? And now, more than ever, we are all bursting to get ahead of ourselves.

I really admire the restraint of others, though. I also admire the inventiveness of the calendar-makers who have invited us to count down to Christmas with any number of goodies from sweets, tea, and alcohol to beauty products, books, and photographs.

My favourite has to be Keogh’s 12 Days of Crispmas Advent Calendar, which manages to conflate the 12 days of Christmas with Advent while using a magnificently bad pun (I mean that as a compliment). Roast turkey and secret stuffing crisps, anyone?

Waiting, counting, and living for treats — the essential elements of an Advent calendar — have also come to sum up the reality of our lives since March 2020. The counting has governed both the waiting and the treats. The numbers of those infected with Covid-19 and those vaccinated against it have determined the length of our wait for a return to the ‘treat’ of normal life.

It has been an uneasy dance between the stick of restrictions and the carrot of freedom, and it is one that is far from over. Right now, we are counting the cases of the new Omicron Covid variant and waiting to see what that will mean in our daily lives.

The Advent calendar also shines a light on another uneasy dance; the one between sacred and profane that has been playing out ever since earliest times when Christian faiths, and others, positioned important dates of the year on older rites and rituals.

Scratch the date of Christmas and you’ll find Saturnalia, the Roman festival in honour of Saturn that ran from mid-December to December 23. The winter solstice on December 21 was also an important date in many cultures, while the period running up to it was a time of fast before the celebration of plenty and the return of light.

The late-December date was later incorporated into the Christian liturgical calendar where Advent is a time of preparation for the birth of Jesus.

It’s hardly news to comment on the commercialisation of Christmas or the commodification of the season of Advent.

Black Friday and its multimillion-euro splurge means the Christmas spending spree now starts at the end of November.

An estimated 60% of us were planning to shop online and continue until Cyber Monday, just gone. This year, consumers were reminded to shop local and take into account the environmental impact of packaging, delivery, and factory production.

Against that background, the Advent calendar is small fry. I’d even argue that the spirit of those calendars, even the most commercial ones, captures something of the wonder of this time of year. It slows us down and offers chinks of light in the darkness.

And there’s the word, ‘chink’, that brings me back every year to Patrick Kavanagh’s emotive poem ‘Advent’: “ We have tested and tasted too much lover- /Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.”

Poet Patrick Kavanagh

The opening lines have a different resonance at a time when testing for Covid-19 is such a regular occurrence, though there has been renewed talk of wonder. We have tried, at least, to develop a new appreciation of the world when we witnessed so much of it being taken away with loss of life, livelihoods, and daily freedoms.

We may not be eating dry black bread and sugarless tea in the Advent-darkened room, as the Monaghan poet was, but our recent experience of deprivation, in so many forms, certainly has the power to “ charm back the luxury of a child’s soul”, as he so beautifully put it.

For all the hardships of the last, awful, 20 months, there has been a new-found appreciation of the small glories of everyday living. We have seen, as Kavanagh hoped we might, the “ newness that was in every stale thing/When we looked at it as children”.

For him, that was the “ spirit-shocking wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill” and watching “ the whins/And the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins.”

He also talks of “dreeping hedges”; is there any better word to describe the creeping drip weighing down a winter hedge?

What strikes a chord for me now, though, is Kavanagh’s last line: “ And Christ comes with a January flower.”

I don’t read that in a religious way, but as a reminder that light returns, and with it, hope. Let’s count down to that.