Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So, as this episode airs, we are already into Advent, both on the religious calendar and as the word relates to Christmas countdown calendars and those two things. Even though the countdown calendars have become very very secular in some iterations, they still share a root origin. And today you can get gift calendars that are called Advent calendars don't even count down to Christmas, they don't really reference Advent at all, but they'll still get called that, right, Like there are birthday countdown calendars you can get. It's doesn't have anything to do with Advent, but the name has become so connected to this idea of a countdown calendar. And to talk about Advent calendars, which is really what this episode is about, we do have to talk about the religious observation of Ada, which has historically been less clear cut in execution than you may imagine. I feel like, especially if someone's not deeply religious or if they're not Catholic, they're like, Advent has a lot of rules well kind of, we'll see, they don't always get they have certainly not always, and even today they don't always get observed in the same ways. And the transition to commercially available products that are more about the secular celebration of Christmas than the religious one, but still have the same name centers more than anything on children and private celebrations, and how that kind of changed over to be something else. But the commercial version of the Advent calendar, i will say, is a pretty recent development. So that's what we're talking about today. So the word advent comes from the Latin ad venire to come to, and you'll sometimes see the word adventists, which means arrival. So from a religious perspective, Advent is part of Christian religious preparation for Christmas. Just does a note of clarity, Like we were talking about non Orthodox, like not the Orthodox churches, but like Catholicism, most Protestant denominations. Right, there are other versions of Advent within those other religions, but they they're on a slightly different calendar and they don't track quite the same way. Right, So the common version of Advent that our listeners are probably most familiar with runs over four Sundays leading up to Christmas ending on Christmas Eve. So, for example, the year that we're recording this in twenty twenty three, Advent is on the shorter side because Christmas Eve is on a Sunday, so this is from Sunday, December third to Sunday December twenty fourth. This period is intended to be a time of reflection and preparation for the Christmas holiday, and it's also considered a preparation for the second Coming of Christ. In I would say in some denominations that was like not a big part of it in my upbringing. Yeah, there are some Catholic churches that really go in on that in my experience, and some that do not. So some churches celebrated it more generally as a season to focus on and honor Christ. Advent marks the beginning of the liturgical year, and depending on the denomination, Advent celebrations might include an Advent wreath with those four Sundays represented. Those Sundays usually each have their own theme. A lot of times it's hope, peace, joy and love, and the use of a wreath to celebrate Advent is tied to German Lutheran Johann Vickeran who introduced it as a visual countdown to Christmas in his church at a home for boys in eighteen thirty eight, and we'll come back to that. Advent has been around at least since the fourth century, when Bishop Perpetuus of Tours set up a pre Christmas fast as part of his church's calendar. Similar pre Christmas observations rapidly spread to other parts of Europe, and it took different forms then, often dependent on location. So there was a version of it that lasted for six Sundays. Pope Gregory the First also known as Gregory the Great, reduced it to four Sundays during his papacy that ran from five ninety to six oh four. And while there appear to have been some efforts to confine Advent just to December, that timeframe was not adopted by the Catholic Church right so Advent can start in November. The longer version may have been intended to include Epiphany that would account for that six weeks that goes past Christmas and beyond, but that's a little bit unclear. It doesn't really match up to some of the original dates mentioned, but there is a pretty popular theory that includes Epiphany, in that early instances of Advent may have tied not just to a Christmas countdown, but to the preparation for the baptisms that would normally happen to coincide with Epiphany. The start of the Advent season, going back to Bishop Perpetuus, appears to have initially co incided with the death of Saint Martin in a fast that follows the Feast of Saint Martin that begins in early November, So that would have initially included the stretch from early November to Christmas, not into January, and that might account for the sixth Sunday length. By the eighteenth century, the idea of Advent had been deeply cemented as an important part of the religious calendar. There had also been more lore and tradition established regarding Advent. In the seventeen seventy five book The Movable Feasts, Fasts and Other Annual Observances of the Catholic Church, the reverend doctor Alban Butler wrote this about Advent quote, Advent is a time of penance and devotion before Christmas, appointed by the Church to serve as a preparation to that great solemnity of the birth of Christ. Festivals were commanded by God himself and the Old Law to commemorate his principle, benefits and mercies, that men might be more perfectly instructed in them, bear them all ways in mind, be always thankful for them, and stirred up to dispose themselves to receive the fruits of these wonderful mysteries. The festivals of the New Law of Gray sought to be celebrated with so much the greater preparation and devotion as the mysteries which we commemorate transcend those of the Old Law, which, how wonderful of ever, were no more than weak types and figures, and empty shadows of them. By the time of Butler's writing, the rules of advent timing within the Catholic Church were firmly established, though he notes that there continued to be differing observations regionally. He establishes the four Sundays of Advent as falling from the Sunday nearest Saint Andrew's Day on either side of it, so even if the Sunday was before it or after it, whichever was closest, that's where it started. He also notes in the text that a forty day Advent was in place at one time as a sort of parallel to Lent, and was established in five eighty one at the Council of Mine. That version was forty days, no matter how many Sundays were involved. It was also sometimes called Saint Martin's Lent rather than Advent. Butler also notes that in Milan in the late eighteenth century, the six week Advent, which includes six Sundays, was still being observed when he wrote this so late eighteenth century. According to Butler's research, in the tenth century, Pope Nicholas the First also endorsed the four sunday version rather than forty days. Up to that point, monks in England and Ireland particularly had continued to observe the forty day rule, fasting most of the day and then eating one meal in the evening. Butler concludes his discussion of the varying advent calendar dates by saying, quote, almost the whole Latin Church, in conformity with the Roman has long since reduced advent to the uniform rule of four weeks, or at least four sundays beginning about the end of November, from the Sunday nearest the Feast of Saint Andrew. So we just mentioned fasting, and even the rules around that have been wildly different depending on the time and place. That Council of macall in five eighty one that we mentioned laid out a proposed fasting schedule of three days a week Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the whole forty days, and even on days that weren't fasting days, meat was to be avoided. Some churches encouraged both fasting and quote abstinence from cohabitation in the married state. Some observances of Advent focused more on spiritual preparation for the Christmas holiday and its meaning within the church, rather than requiring physical observation through fasting or abstinence from sexual intercourse. Even in Butler's book, he notes that quote in monastic orders, the fast of Advent has always been looked upon us less rigorous and less solemn than that of Lent. The bottom line is that even though there are church recognized dates and practices of Advent, even within any religious denomination, different areas or even individual churches can still define for themselves a lot of the specifics about how this period is observed and celebrated. So this is all religious history obviously that we've been talking about, but Advent is often marked by secular advent calendars, So how did that start. We're going to talk about it right after we take a quick sponsor break. We noted in the discussion of religious observations of Advent that a wreath was introduced into churches as a way to visually mark the progression of the season and the approach of Christmas, and in Germany in the mid nineteenth century, this was one of several practices that shifted the Advent to include ways to track the countdown to Christmas at home for children. So sometimes marking the days that countdown to Christmas was really simple, like families just marking the day with chalk. I read different accounts it said like in some families, like they would put on the door, for example, like all of the chalk mark for all of the days, and they would erase one each day, and in others they would add one each day. Like it was a very personal way of marking it, and everybody had their own way of doing it. It also started to include small physical daily items, often paired with Bible verses to combine the religious observation with this idea of excitement of a visit from Santa and also teach kids about calendars. This started to shift from lining up with the moving target of Advent dates that are like the four Sundays, say and Andrews, to just being December first to twenty fourth. And that makes sense, particularly when you consider that these work countdowns that focused on children. Right, it's easy to track Advent when the first day of it lines up with December first and so on, but it would surely be harder for little kids in particular to have the calendar say November twenty ninth, for example, when the Advent calendar says two. So for example, a family might be setting up a line of candles on their mantle to be lit in a succession as the twenty four days from December first to December twenty fourth unfolded. The Advent wreath, as we noted, is credited to Johann Heinrich Vickern in the eighteen thirties, and this was adapted for home use in Germany in a way very similar to the way that we use Advent calendars. And in this countdown, each day a prayer or a Bible verse was read and then a candle was lit on the wreath. If you haven't seen one of these before and you're like, how would this work? The wreath is flat on a surface or hung from a chandelier. It's not vertically on the wall or a door or something like that. Versions of the Advent wreath could vary from the four candle one that mimicked those that might appear in churches all the way to twenty four day ones that mark December one through twenty fourth. These could be decorated with ornaments, but the focus remained on the religious verses and using the light the candles to create kind of a halo. So the Advent wreath is associated with Protestant traditions, and this too offers a possible insight into why they count down from December first instead of the religious calendar of Advent as it related to the Catholic Church. They simply were not governed by the Catholic Church's rules of when Advents started, since most of the Protestant versions of countdowns were part of family traditions and celebrations rather than part of any more formalized church observants, they were also just free to do what they wished and what made sense for their family in this regard. Another Protestant originated countdown convention is the Advent tree. This is a practice that began in eighteen forty six in Duisburg, Germany. And once again this was a tradition that started in a home for wayward boys as both a Christmas countdown and in didactic religious practice. So a small fur tree was planted in a pot in the home at the beginning of Advent, and then every day a Bible Verse was read aloud by one of the boys with the intention that they would all memorize it that night. And then the next day a candle was lit on the tree and another Bible verse was read to be memorized, and this daily candle and Bible verse practice continued every day of Advent until the tree was decorated and Advent ended. This practice was picked up in private homes as well, and a business grew out of it as printers started producing heavy paper or cardboard ornaments that had Bible verses printed on them and even stars to top the tree. So to be clear, this Advent tree was not something used instead of a Christmas tree. A lot of times the two would be alongside one another as kind of a commingling of Christmas decora and traditions. Yeah, one rite up that I read kind of made it sound like you did the Advent tree and then when it was done, you carried that one into the room with the Christmas tree. But I wasn't sure if that was a translation issue. It seems like it would be a pain in the neck to move a tree with candles on it, so I think that is what the problem was. Austria developed its own variation on the Advent calendar, called a Heaven Ladder. This version walked children down the ladder as the days progressed, so each wrung was a day and it was intended to represent the way that God descends to earth to be present with humanity on Christmas. There were also candles that could be used in some celebrations, intended to be burned only a specific amount each day. That was in both Austria and other European countries. There are also, we should say, a lot of different ways to count down Advent that we're not even touching on because some of them probably aren't even documented as personal ways to do it. The German Christmas Museum describes Advent calendars this way, which Holly found delightful. Quote. Advent or Christmas calendars are tools devised by adults for children to make the remaining time until Christmas Eve countable and to stir up anticipation. Their English translation of their page on Advent calendars, so Holly is hopeful that the German language version is just as charming. I don't know why. It's like it's a tool for kids to make them happy, keep them occupied. We noted that the days were sometimes marked really simply in advent countdowns, like with chalk. But another form of simple advent calendar was mentioned in an eighteen fifty one children's book about Christmas by German social activist Elise Averdick. In that book, a little girl in her mother marked the days by hanging pictures on the wall related to the story of Christmas, and a lot of homes did this for decades. Advent calendars for home use were also homemade. I don't want to make it sound like that's over. There are still people that make homemade Advent calendars, and so they can take whatever form the creativity of the adults involved desire. The first printed Advent calendar was made in nineteen hundred in Munich and told the story of Santa Claus. But this is a very small run. Two years later there was a commercially made Advent clock. This was not really a clock, but it was two printouts of clockfaces in which each of the twelve hours on the first image corresponded to December one through twelve, and the twelve hours on the second image corresponded to the days thirteen to twenty four. So each day the hands of the clock this paper clock could be advanced as Christmas could grew nearer. Because that nineteen hundred Santa Claus Advent calendar appears not to have been widely released, there's another point at which the Advent calendar is often said to have been invented. In the early nineteen hundreds, a German printer named Gerhard Lang is credited with printing the first commercial Advent calendar. According to the legend, this was inspired by his mother's practice of sewing twenty four cookies into a box lid for him every year as a child, to be opened day by day as Christmas approached. And if you're wondering how cookies would survive twenty four days involved in this countdown, these were allegedly Vibela cookies, which are more like biscuits that share characteristics with meringues or the cookie part of a mackerel, so they were probably okay for a few weeks. The last few probably chewier then that would be freshly made. Because Lang's not only made a widely distributed calendar, he continued to print new ones for decades. His name is the one that's most associated with the beginnings of advent calendars as a consumer product. There is not a load of readily available information about Gerhard Lang. If you search his name, a few examples come up over and over, none of which are him. One is a printer from Frankfurt who was born in nineteen twenty one and is linked to the beginning of font design, which is pretty fascinating. Another was a botanist born in nineteen twenty four, and yet another was a brewer and Democratic State committeeman who lived in Buffalo, New York. None of those are the Advent calendar guy. So we don't know much about the life of Gerhard Lang, who is sometimes called the inventor of the advent calendar. But what we do know is that he eventually was made a partner in a publishing company called Reichold and Lang. The date that Lang published his first calendar is different depending on what source you look at. Some say nineteen oh eight, others placed the date earlier in the nineteen hundreds. There's a children's book called Waiting for Christmas from two thousand and six that shares an imagined version of Gerhard Lang as a child learning about Advent through his mother's cookie countdown. The book says the cookies were Lebkitchen, So who knows that book included the nineteen oh eight date, and it might be where other recent accounts picked that year up. Lang's collaborator on several of these Advent calendars was an illustrator named Richard Ernst Kepler. You can find some of Kepler's early Advent calendar illustrations for Laying online, and one of these is from nineteen oh three, and it's titled in the Land of the Christ Child, and it features in an array of scenes that all depict children, either representing moments from the life of Christ or showing some imagery that's commonly associated with the more secular aspects of Christmas, like nutcrackers and dolls and other toys. These calendars started out just as paper calendars that had a degree of activity to them. You could open a little window and see a Bible verse, or you could paste an image onto the square that noted the day. The original edition of In the Land of the Christ Child, for example, wasn't even sold on its own, It was an insert in a newspaper. It was the Stuttgarter new Tagblat. There were two sheets that made up the calendar, and then after reading the Bible verse framed in each square of the calendar, kids could cut out the corresponding art to paste over it. The National Museum of Germany recognizes nineteen oh three as the year of the first advent calendar because of that newspaper distributed start of Lang's long career, making them Another reason the nineteen oh eight origin date comes up is because although Lang started before that date, it wasn't until nineteen oh eight that he was actually producing advent calendars that sold just on their own outside of some other publication. Over time, the Lang Advent calendars became more complex and they started to look a little more like the ones that you could purchase today. If your family has one of those calendars, that's like part of the family tradition that hangs on a door with pockets or some other interactive feature. Those door calendars are an idea that came from Lang. Similarly, the first Advent calendar with a chocolate behind each door is credited to him, although his first one did not have the chocolate included. It was just set up so that parents could fill it up for their kids to then have them. This is a good way to get around the idea to sidestep the problem of chocolate getting stale on shelves because it goes out onto the show shelf sometime in July. One of his calendars, which sounds very quaint, was a small cardboard house, and each day of the Advent countdown, one of the windows would be opened, and then when all of the windows and finally on the last day, the door was open. The calendar had become a lantern and it was meant to put a candle inside. He created the first Advent calendar for blind consumers in nineteen thirty and by the nineteen thirties Advent calendars had become very popular in Germany and they were a pretty standard part of a lot of families holiday traditions. They had also become pretty popular by that time in Great Britain because Lang had started shipping them there in the years following World War One. During the time that Lang was making calendars, the Sank Johannis Printing Company also started making Advent calendars. Sank Johannas started printing in the nineteen twenties and sometimes is credited with the openable doors on Advent calendars, although Lang also gets the credit for that in a lot of sources. Yeah, it's hard to pin down. World War two, though, put the brakes on the printing of Advent calendars, as it put their Greeks on a lot of things. Not long after the war started, the rising prices on paper products meant that reich Holden Lang just could not stay in business, and then paper goods were also rationed. Then no illustrated calendars were allowed to be printed under the Third Reich, at least not any that were not Nazi produced and intended to indoctrinate children in a Nazi ideology. New Advent calendars just simply could not exist during World War II. But when the war ended, the Advent calendar was one of those things that pretty quickly bounced back. The companies that had survived the war were able to get back into printing production relatively quickly, and this also was probably motivated by a desire to recapture a sliver of normalcy for children in Germany post war, and there were Advent calendars available by Christmas nineteen forty five. US soldiers stationed in Europe bought them and then brought them home when their tours were over. One of the major sellers of Advent calendars after the war was Richard Selmer, who started producing Advent calendars in nineteen forty five. Selmer's first calendar was called The Little Town, sometimes also appearing in print as the Little Christmas Town, and it featured a serene looking village in the winter kind of a balm. After the war. Incidentally, you can still buy the Little Town calendars from Selmer's company, which today is called Selmer Verlag. As their offerings have expanded to include a wide variety of Advent calendars. Selmer Verlag reports that they sell as many for adults as they do for children. Her website also has photos of some of their Advent calendars from decades ago. Selmer's real genius, though, was expanding his business into the international market, seeing how eager visitors to Germany were for Advent calendars, who started distributing in North America in nineteen forty six, and one of the pivotal moments in the US that is cited as giving Advent calendars a huge boost was a photo that was published during the Eisenhower presidency. That photo was of Dwight D. Eisenhower opening an Advent calendar with his grandchildren. There were also some additional photos of the kids holding up the calendar and smiling. Those photographs ran in Newsweek in nineteen fifty four, and it made the novelty of an Advent calendar something that a lot of US families wanted in their own homes. A photo, though, was no accident. The photo op was intended to promote the sales of the calendars to raise money for the National Epilepsy League, and the calendar that was photographed with the Eisenhower family that was Richard Selmer's Little Christmas Town. Selmer had arranged for the calendars to be sold for charity because he knew that it would help establish the United States as a market for Advent calendars for years, and he was of course correct. In nineteen seventy one, Cadbury introduced its first Advent calendar filled with Cadbury chocolate santas, although that didn't catch on immediately, and the company didn't always offer Advent calendars because they didn't always sell. By the nineteen nineties, though, they had become a regular part of the annual product offerings. Today. One of the interesting ways that Advent calendars have evolved is into this unique space of being a marketing tool. So more and more companies have custom calendars printed just to market their products, and this can be a giveaway, so like think the kind of calendar mailers you might sometimes receive from companies in the winter to promote their offerings or and this is really fascinating to me, there's this more subtle aspect where they become products themselves. So when consumers purchase Advent calendars that are made by companies because they're perhaps fans of that company, they're also essentially getting samples of products that might lead them to buy more. And because Advent calendars are also marketed as gifts, it's kind of like consumers are paying a company for a gift they will give someone else that will help market that company's products to the recipient. We mentioned a moment ago that Advent calendars have become not just a way to count down to Christmas, but also are now gifts themselves, and there's truly something for everyone. There are socks. Every ip you can think of probably has an Advent calendar associated with it. Another evolution of the concept of Advent calendars is like virtual digital calendars, and sometimes these are packaged as a physical item, but every day's reveal is something that you have to open online. Yeah. Sometimes it's like the music download calendar and you just get a new song every day, like the There have been so many creative iterations of how to use this concept. The largest Advent calendar on record, according to the Guinness Book of Records, was built in two thousand and seven at Saint Pancras station in London as part of the station's renovation celebration. That was seventy one meters that's two hundred and thirty two feet and eleven inches high and twenty three meters as seventy five feet five inches wide. I will say I have seen some other Advent calendars that looked like they might be more giant than this like, there's a town in Germany where their town hall is made into a giant Advent calendar every year. And I'm not sure it's not bigger than this, but this is the Guinness World record holder. But this giant Advent calendar at Saint Pancras station had digital windows. The entire thing was really a fundraiser for the Great Ormond Street Hospital charity. Maybe the most startling of all the advent calendars that's turned up in Holly's research was one that was offered by Porsche in twenty ten, and there were only five of them made available, one for each continent where the company had businesses. The physical calendar itself was made of brushed aluminum and as tall as a person. The treats inside each revial were completely over the top. The recipient of this would get a watch one day, gold sunglasses another. There was even a custom designed kitchen and custom yacht. Each of these Advent calendars, sold in twenty ten, cost one million dollars. One of the most beautiful advent calendars, in my opinion, that has been published since twenty twelve is the Atlantic's annual Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar. So This online outlet posts a new image from the Telescope each day, selecting some of the most spectacular and fascinating photos of space that humans have ever seen. The Advent Calendar has also manifested as a community event in some places. So every day people gather at a spot to see an actual thing like a storefront window or a church door or et cetera, something that's been decorated to mark the day. Some of these are religious, some are more secular. It's a neat way that's sort of taken something that's become very commercial and maybe kitchen some ways to more bring people together. Yeah, Advent calendars. Listen, we can talk about having calendars a lot behind the scenes because I love them. Uh. And now we're gonna pop over to listener mail. Hey, this listener mail is from our listener Rebecca, and she is writing in response to our episode about Gin based cocktail history. She writes, Hey, y'all, I have started to write so many times, but the Gin Cocktails episode finally made me follow through. I was raised by a very proper Southern Baptist Mama. Yes I am that Southern. My parents were and will always be Mama and Daddy They weren't exactly teetotalers, but alcohol just wasn't a thing in our home when I was growing up, like everybody else in North Georgia. They both had uncles who made liquor or were known to frequent the best moonshiners when they got a thirst. My parents married in the sixties and started to move in circles where an occasional cocktail was served. A lady in town who was known for exceptional good graces and manners advised Mama to order a Tom Collins and sip it very slow, and throughout their social lives that became her go to. In my college days, I had the requisite fun that comes with matriculating in a southern university town. Go dogs. But if my parents knew, they never let on. I'm going to pick up this email from Holly and say after graduation, Mama sat me down and said, now, when you're at a cocktail party or a work function, order a Tom Collins and sip it really slow. She had no idea that I was much more educated when it came to cocktail choices, and I let it stay that way for the most part. Mama passed away in February the episode brought me a sweet memory of a story I've shared many times through the years. Sometime soon, I planned to have a Tom Collins in memory of both my parents. I don't have a pet right now, so I don't have a picture to share. I tried to find one of Blackie, mama's last cat. She showed up one Saturday morning and didn't leave for eighteen years. Daddy was a dog person, but that cat stole his heart too. Thanks for all the great and hard work. I hope y'all do a live show in Atlanta someday soon so I can meet you both in person. Rebecca Tracy picked that up because I got real weak about it. So I also read this email this morning, and it reminded me earlier in my life, when I was in college. I think I went to the beach with my mom and a couple of her sisters, and they wanted to make a thing they can they typically consumed on their beach trips, which they described as wine coolers. It was diet mountain dew mixed with white sefidel, and they were having trouble getting the cork out of the white zefandel, and I went and effortlessly took care of it, and there was a shared moment among my mom and her sisters in which they just sort of wordlessly acknowledged that I, their daughter slash niece, who they still saw as a child, knew how to operate a corkscrew. I love it. I love it. Good memories. We'll talk about that Diamount and Duo White z Evanel in a minute when we do behind the scenes. I have some thoughts, So if again, thank you so much for this email, and I want to send my condolences. You got me all choked up. It's so sweet. If you would like to email us, you can do that at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History, and if you have not subscribed yet, you can do that lickety split in the iHeartRadio app, or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So, as this episode airs, we are already into Advent, both on the religious calendar and as the word relates to Christmas countdown calendars and those two things. Even though the countdown calendars have become very very secular in some iterations, they still share a root origin. And today you can get gift calendars that are called Advent calendars don't even count down to Christmas, they don't really reference Advent at all, but they'll still get called that, right, Like there are birthday countdown calendars you can get. It's doesn't have anything to do with Advent, but the name has become so connected to this idea of a countdown calendar. And to talk about Advent calendars, which is really what this episode is about, we do have to talk about the religious observation of Ada, which has historically been less clear cut in execution than you may imagine. I feel like, especially if someone's not deeply religious or if they're not Catholic, they're like, Advent has a lot of rules well kind of, we'll see, they don't always get they have certainly not always, and even today they don't always get observed in the same ways. And the transition to commercially available products that are more about the secular celebration of Christmas than the religious one, but still have the same name centers more than anything on children and private celebrations, and how that kind of changed over to be something else. But the commercial version of the Advent calendar, i will say, is a pretty recent development. So that's what we're talking about today. So the word advent comes from the Latin ad venire to come to, and you'll sometimes see the word adventists, which means arrival. So from a religious perspective, Advent is part of Christian religious preparation for Christmas. Just does a note of clarity, Like we were talking about non Orthodox, like not the Orthodox churches, but like Catholicism, most Protestant denominations. Right, there are other versions of Advent within those other religions, but they they're on a slightly different calendar and they don't track quite the same way. Right, So the common version of Advent that our listeners are probably most familiar with runs over four Sundays leading up to Christmas ending on Christmas Eve. So, for example, the year that we're recording this in twenty twenty three, Advent is on the shorter side because Christmas Eve is on a Sunday, so this is from Sunday, December third to Sunday December twenty fourth. This period is intended to be a time of reflection and preparation for the Christmas holiday, and it's also considered a preparation for the second Coming of Christ. In I would say in some denominations that was like not a big part of it in my upbringing. Yeah, there are some Catholic churches that really go in on that in my experience, and some that do not. So some churches celebrated it more generally as a season to focus on and honor Christ. Advent marks the beginning of the liturgical year, and depending on the denomination, Advent celebrations might include an Advent wreath with those four Sundays represented. Those Sundays usually each have their own theme. A lot of times it's hope, peace, joy and love, and the use of a wreath to celebrate Advent is tied to German Lutheran Johann Vickeran who introduced it as a visual countdown to Christmas in his church at a home for boys in eighteen thirty eight, and we'll come back to that. Advent has been around at least since the fourth century, when Bishop Perpetuus of Tours set up a pre Christmas fast as part of his church's calendar. Similar pre Christmas observations rapidly spread to other parts of Europe, and it took different forms then, often dependent on location. So there was a version of it that lasted for six Sundays. Pope Gregory the First also known as Gregory the Great, reduced it to four Sundays during his papacy that ran from five ninety to six oh four. And while there appear to have been some efforts to confine Advent just to December, that timeframe was not adopted by the Catholic Church right so Advent can start in November. The longer version may have been intended to include Epiphany that would account for that six weeks that goes past Christmas and beyond, but that's a little bit unclear. It doesn't really match up to some of the original dates mentioned, but there is a pretty popular theory that includes Epiphany, in that early instances of Advent may have tied not just to a Christmas countdown, but to the preparation for the baptisms that would normally happen to coincide with Epiphany. The start of the Advent season, going back to Bishop Perpetuus, appears to have initially co incided with the death of Saint Martin in a fast that follows the Feast of Saint Martin that begins in early November, So that would have initially included the stretch from early November to Christmas, not into January, and that might account for the sixth Sunday length. By the eighteenth century, the idea of Advent had been deeply cemented as an important part of the religious calendar. There had also been more lore and tradition established regarding Advent. In the seventeen seventy five book The Movable Feasts, Fasts and Other Annual Observances of the Catholic Church, the reverend doctor Alban Butler wrote this about Advent quote, Advent is a time of penance and devotion before Christmas, appointed by the Church to serve as a preparation to that great solemnity of the birth of Christ. Festivals were commanded by God himself and the Old Law to commemorate his principle, benefits and mercies, that men might be more perfectly instructed in them, bear them all ways in mind, be always thankful for them, and stirred up to dispose themselves to receive the fruits of these wonderful mysteries. The festivals of the New Law of Gray sought to be celebrated with so much the greater preparation and devotion as the mysteries which we commemorate transcend those of the Old Law, which, how wonderful of ever, were no more than weak types and figures, and empty shadows of them. By the time of Butler's writing, the rules of advent timing within the Catholic Church were firmly established, though he notes that there continued to be differing observations regionally. He establishes the four Sundays of Advent as falling from the Sunday nearest Saint Andrew's Day on either side of it, so even if the Sunday was before it or after it, whichever was closest, that's where it started. He also notes in the text that a forty day Advent was in place at one time as a sort of parallel to Lent, and was established in five eighty one at the Council of Mine. That version was forty days, no matter how many Sundays were involved. It was also sometimes called Saint Martin's Lent rather than Advent. Butler also notes that in Milan in the late eighteenth century, the six week Advent, which includes six Sundays, was still being observed when he wrote this so late eighteenth century. According to Butler's research, in the tenth century, Pope Nicholas the First also endorsed the four sunday version rather than forty days. Up to that point, monks in England and Ireland particularly had continued to observe the forty day rule, fasting most of the day and then eating one meal in the evening. Butler concludes his discussion of the varying advent calendar dates by saying, quote, almost the whole Latin Church, in conformity with the Roman has long since reduced advent to the uniform rule of four weeks, or at least four sundays beginning about the end of November, from the Sunday nearest the Feast of Saint Andrew. So we just mentioned fasting, and even the rules around that have been wildly different depending on the time and place. That Council of macall in five eighty one that we mentioned laid out a proposed fasting schedule of three days a week Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the whole forty days, and even on days that weren't fasting days, meat was to be avoided. Some churches encouraged both fasting and quote abstinence from cohabitation in the married state. Some observances of Advent focused more on spiritual preparation for the Christmas holiday and its meaning within the church, rather than requiring physical observation through fasting or abstinence from sexual intercourse. Even in Butler's book, he notes that quote in monastic orders, the fast of Advent has always been looked upon us less rigorous and less solemn than that of Lent. The bottom line is that even though there are church recognized dates and practices of Advent, even within any religious denomination, different areas or even individual churches can still define for themselves a lot of the specifics about how this period is observed and celebrated. So this is all religious history obviously that we've been talking about, but Advent is often marked by secular advent calendars, So how did that start. We're going to talk about it right after we take a quick sponsor break. We noted in the discussion of religious observations of Advent that a wreath was introduced into churches as a way to visually mark the progression of the season and the approach of Christmas, and in Germany in the mid nineteenth century, this was one of several practices that shifted the Advent to include ways to track the countdown to Christmas at home for children. So sometimes marking the days that countdown to Christmas was really simple, like families just marking the day with chalk. I read different accounts it said like in some families, like they would put on the door, for example, like all of the chalk mark for all of the days, and they would erase one each day, and in others they would add one each day. Like it was a very personal way of marking it, and everybody had their own way of doing it. It also started to include small physical daily items, often paired with Bible verses to combine the religious observation with this idea of excitement of a visit from Santa and also teach kids about calendars. This started to shift from lining up with the moving target of Advent dates that are like the four Sundays, say and Andrews, to just being December first to twenty fourth. And that makes sense, particularly when you consider that these work countdowns that focused on children. Right, it's easy to track Advent when the first day of it lines up with December first and so on, but it would surely be harder for little kids in particular to have the calendar say November twenty ninth, for example, when the Advent calendar says two. So for example, a family might be setting up a line of candles on their mantle to be lit in a succession as the twenty four days from December first to December twenty fourth unfolded. The Advent wreath, as we noted, is credited to Johann Heinrich Vickern in the eighteen thirties, and this was adapted for home use in Germany in a way very similar to the way that we use Advent calendars. And in this countdown, each day a prayer or a Bible verse was read and then a candle was lit on the wreath. If you haven't seen one of these before and you're like, how would this work? The wreath is flat on a surface or hung from a chandelier. It's not vertically on the wall or a door or something like that. Versions of the Advent wreath could vary from the four candle one that mimicked those that might appear in churches all the way to twenty four day ones that mark December one through twenty fourth. These could be decorated with ornaments, but the focus remained on the religious verses and using the light the candles to create kind of a halo. So the Advent wreath is associated with Protestant traditions, and this too offers a possible insight into why they count down from December first instead of the religious calendar of Advent as it related to the Catholic Church. They simply were not governed by the Catholic Church's rules of when Advents started, since most of the Protestant versions of countdowns were part of family traditions and celebrations rather than part of any more formalized church observants, they were also just free to do what they wished and what made sense for their family in this regard. Another Protestant originated countdown convention is the Advent tree. This is a practice that began in eighteen forty six in Duisburg, Germany. And once again this was a tradition that started in a home for wayward boys as both a Christmas countdown and in didactic religious practice. So a small fur tree was planted in a pot in the home at the beginning of Advent, and then every day a Bible Verse was read aloud by one of the boys with the intention that they would all memorize it that night. And then the next day a candle was lit on the tree and another Bible verse was read to be memorized, and this daily candle and Bible verse practice continued every day of Advent until the tree was decorated and Advent ended. This practice was picked up in private homes as well, and a business grew out of it as printers started producing heavy paper or cardboard ornaments that had Bible verses printed on them and even stars to top the tree. So to be clear, this Advent tree was not something used instead of a Christmas tree. A lot of times the two would be alongside one another as kind of a commingling of Christmas decora and traditions. Yeah, one rite up that I read kind of made it sound like you did the Advent tree and then when it was done, you carried that one into the room with the Christmas tree. But I wasn't sure if that was a translation issue. It seems like it would be a pain in the neck to move a tree with candles on it, so I think that is what the problem was. Austria developed its own variation on the Advent calendar, called a Heaven Ladder. This version walked children down the ladder as the days progressed, so each wrung was a day and it was intended to represent the way that God descends to earth to be present with humanity on Christmas. There were also candles that could be used in some celebrations, intended to be burned only a specific amount each day. That was in both Austria and other European countries. There are also, we should say, a lot of different ways to count down Advent that we're not even touching on because some of them probably aren't even documented as personal ways to do it. The German Christmas Museum describes Advent calendars this way, which Holly found delightful. Quote. Advent or Christmas calendars are tools devised by adults for children to make the remaining time until Christmas Eve countable and to stir up anticipation. Their English translation of their page on Advent calendars, so Holly is hopeful that the German language version is just as charming. I don't know why. It's like it's a tool for kids to make them happy, keep them occupied. We noted that the days were sometimes marked really simply in advent countdowns, like with chalk. But another form of simple advent calendar was mentioned in an eighteen fifty one children's book about Christmas by German social activist Elise Averdick. In that book, a little girl in her mother marked the days by hanging pictures on the wall related to the story of Christmas, and a lot of homes did this for decades. Advent calendars for home use were also homemade. I don't want to make it sound like that's over. There are still people that make homemade Advent calendars, and so they can take whatever form the creativity of the adults involved desire. The first printed Advent calendar was made in nineteen hundred in Munich and told the story of Santa Claus. But this is a very small run. Two years later there was a commercially made Advent clock. This was not really a clock, but it was two printouts of clockfaces in which each of the twelve hours on the first image corresponded to December one through twelve, and the twelve hours on the second image corresponded to the days thirteen to twenty four. So each day the hands of the clock this paper clock could be advanced as Christmas could grew nearer. Because that nineteen hundred Santa Claus Advent calendar appears not to have been widely released, there's another point at which the Advent calendar is often said to have been invented. In the early nineteen hundreds, a German printer named Gerhard Lang is credited with printing the first commercial Advent calendar. According to the legend, this was inspired by his mother's practice of sewing twenty four cookies into a box lid for him every year as a child, to be opened day by day as Christmas approached. And if you're wondering how cookies would survive twenty four days involved in this countdown, these were allegedly Vibela cookies, which are more like biscuits that share characteristics with meringues or the cookie part of a mackerel, so they were probably okay for a few weeks. The last few probably chewier then that would be freshly made. Because Lang's not only made a widely distributed calendar, he continued to print new ones for decades. His name is the one that's most associated with the beginnings of advent calendars as a consumer product. There is not a load of readily available information about Gerhard Lang. If you search his name, a few examples come up over and over, none of which are him. One is a printer from Frankfurt who was born in nineteen twenty one and is linked to the beginning of font design, which is pretty fascinating. Another was a botanist born in nineteen twenty four, and yet another was a brewer and Democratic State committeeman who lived in Buffalo, New York. None of those are the Advent calendar guy. So we don't know much about the life of Gerhard Lang, who is sometimes called the inventor of the advent calendar. But what we do know is that he eventually was made a partner in a publishing company called Reichold and Lang. The date that Lang published his first calendar is different depending on what source you look at. Some say nineteen oh eight, others placed the date earlier in the nineteen hundreds. There's a children's book called Waiting for Christmas from two thousand and six that shares an imagined version of Gerhard Lang as a child learning about Advent through his mother's cookie countdown. The book says the cookies were Lebkitchen, So who knows that book included the nineteen oh eight date, and it might be where other recent accounts picked that year up. Lang's collaborator on several of these Advent calendars was an illustrator named Richard Ernst Kepler. You can find some of Kepler's early Advent calendar illustrations for Laying online, and one of these is from nineteen oh three, and it's titled in the Land of the Christ Child, and it features in an array of scenes that all depict children, either representing moments from the life of Christ or showing some imagery that's commonly associated with the more secular aspects of Christmas, like nutcrackers and dolls and other toys. These calendars started out just as paper calendars that had a degree of activity to them. You could open a little window and see a Bible verse, or you could paste an image onto the square that noted the day. The original edition of In the Land of the Christ Child, for example, wasn't even sold on its own, It was an insert in a newspaper. It was the Stuttgarter new Tagblat. There were two sheets that made up the calendar, and then after reading the Bible verse framed in each square of the calendar, kids could cut out the corresponding art to paste over it. The National Museum of Germany recognizes nineteen oh three as the year of the first advent calendar because of that newspaper distributed start of Lang's long career, making them Another reason the nineteen oh eight origin date comes up is because although Lang started before that date, it wasn't until nineteen oh eight that he was actually producing advent calendars that sold just on their own outside of some other publication. Over time, the Lang Advent calendars became more complex and they started to look a little more like the ones that you could purchase today. If your family has one of those calendars, that's like part of the family tradition that hangs on a door with pockets or some other interactive feature. Those door calendars are an idea that came from Lang. Similarly, the first Advent calendar with a chocolate behind each door is credited to him, although his first one did not have the chocolate included. It was just set up so that parents could fill it up for their kids to then have them. This is a good way to get around the idea to sidestep the problem of chocolate getting stale on shelves because it goes out onto the show shelf sometime in July. One of his calendars, which sounds very quaint, was a small cardboard house, and each day of the Advent countdown, one of the windows would be opened, and then when all of the windows and finally on the last day, the door was open. The calendar had become a lantern and it was meant to put a candle inside. He created the first Advent calendar for blind consumers in nineteen thirty and by the nineteen thirties Advent calendars had become very popular in Germany and they were a pretty standard part of a lot of families holiday traditions. They had also become pretty popular by that time in Great Britain because Lang had started shipping them there in the years following World War One. During the time that Lang was making calendars, the Sank Johannis Printing Company also started making Advent calendars. Sank Johannas started printing in the nineteen twenties and sometimes is credited with the openable doors on Advent calendars, although Lang also gets the credit for that in a lot of sources. Yeah, it's hard to pin down. World War two, though, put the brakes on the printing of Advent calendars, as it put their Greeks on a lot of things. Not long after the war started, the rising prices on paper products meant that reich Holden Lang just could not stay in business, and then paper goods were also rationed. Then no illustrated calendars were allowed to be printed under the Third Reich, at least not any that were not Nazi produced and intended to indoctrinate children in a Nazi ideology. New Advent calendars just simply could not exist during World War II. But when the war ended, the Advent calendar was one of those things that pretty quickly bounced back. The companies that had survived the war were able to get back into printing production relatively quickly, and this also was probably motivated by a desire to recapture a sliver of normalcy for children in Germany post war, and there were Advent calendars available by Christmas nineteen forty five. US soldiers stationed in Europe bought them and then brought them home when their tours were over. One of the major sellers of Advent calendars after the war was Richard Selmer, who started producing Advent calendars in nineteen forty five. Selmer's first calendar was called The Little Town, sometimes also appearing in print as the Little Christmas Town, and it featured a serene looking village in the winter kind of a balm. After the war. Incidentally, you can still buy the Little Town calendars from Selmer's company, which today is called Selmer Verlag. As their offerings have expanded to include a wide variety of Advent calendars. Selmer Verlag reports that they sell as many for adults as they do for children. Her website also has photos of some of their Advent calendars from decades ago. Selmer's real genius, though, was expanding his business into the international market, seeing how eager visitors to Germany were for Advent calendars, who started distributing in North America in nineteen forty six, and one of the pivotal moments in the US that is cited as giving Advent calendars a huge boost was a photo that was published during the Eisenhower presidency. That photo was of Dwight D. Eisenhower opening an Advent calendar with his grandchildren. There were also some additional photos of the kids holding up the calendar and smiling. Those photographs ran in Newsweek in nineteen fifty four, and it made the novelty of an Advent calendar something that a lot of US families wanted in their own homes. A photo, though, was no accident. The photo op was intended to promote the sales of the calendars to raise money for the National Epilepsy League, and the calendar that was photographed with the Eisenhower family that was Richard Selmer's Little Christmas Town. Selmer had arranged for the calendars to be sold for charity because he knew that it would help establish the United States as a market for Advent calendars for years, and he was of course correct. In nineteen seventy one, Cadbury introduced its first Advent calendar filled with Cadbury chocolate santas, although that didn't catch on immediately, and the company didn't always offer Advent calendars because they didn't always sell. By the nineteen nineties, though, they had become a regular part of the annual product offerings. Today. One of the interesting ways that Advent calendars have evolved is into this unique space of being a marketing tool. So more and more companies have custom calendars printed just to market their products, and this can be a giveaway, so like think the kind of calendar mailers you might sometimes receive from companies in the winter to promote their offerings or and this is really fascinating to me, there's this more subtle aspect where they become products themselves. So when consumers purchase Advent calendars that are made by companies because they're perhaps fans of that company, they're also essentially getting samples of products that might lead them to buy more. And because Advent calendars are also marketed as gifts, it's kind of like consumers are paying a company for a gift they will give someone else that will help market that company's products to the recipient. We mentioned a moment ago that Advent calendars have become not just a way to count down to Christmas, but also are now gifts themselves, and there's truly something for everyone. There are socks. Every ip you can think of probably has an Advent calendar associated with it. Another evolution of the concept of Advent calendars is like virtual digital calendars, and sometimes these are packaged as a physical item, but every day's reveal is something that you have to open online. Yeah. Sometimes it's like the music download calendar and you just get a new song every day, like the There have been so many creative iterations of how to use this concept. The largest Advent calendar on record, according to the Guinness Book of Records, was built in two thousand and seven at Saint Pancras station in London as part of the station's renovation celebration. That was seventy one meters that's two hundred and thirty two feet and eleven inches high and twenty three meters as seventy five feet five inches wide. I will say I have seen some other Advent calendars that looked like they might be more giant than this like, there's a town in Germany where their town hall is made into a giant Advent calendar every year. And I'm not sure it's not bigger than this, but this is the Guinness World record holder. But this giant Advent calendar at Saint Pancras station had digital windows. The entire thing was really a fundraiser for the Great Ormond Street Hospital charity. Maybe the most startling of all the advent calendars that's turned up in Holly's research was one that was offered by Porsche in twenty ten, and there were only five of them made available, one for each continent where the company had businesses. The physical calendar itself was made of brushed aluminum and as tall as a person. The treats inside each revial were completely over the top. The recipient of this would get a watch one day, gold sunglasses another. There was even a custom designed kitchen and custom yacht. Each of these Advent calendars, sold in twenty ten, cost one million dollars. One of the most beautiful advent calendars, in my opinion, that has been published since twenty twelve is the Atlantic's annual Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar. So This online outlet posts a new image from the Telescope each day, selecting some of the most spectacular and fascinating photos of space that humans have ever seen. The Advent Calendar has also manifested as a community event in some places. So every day people gather at a spot to see an actual thing like a storefront window or a church door or et cetera, something that's been decorated to mark the day. Some of these are religious, some are more secular. It's a neat way that's sort of taken something that's become very commercial and maybe kitchen some ways to more bring people together. Yeah, Advent calendars. Listen, we can talk about having calendars a lot behind the scenes because I love them. Uh. And now we're gonna pop over to listener mail. Hey, this listener mail is from our listener Rebecca, and she is writing in response to our episode about Gin based cocktail history. She writes, Hey, y'all, I have started to write so many times, but the Gin Cocktails episode finally made me follow through. I was raised by a very proper Southern Baptist Mama. Yes I am that Southern. My parents were and will always be Mama and Daddy They weren't exactly teetotalers, but alcohol just wasn't a thing in our home when I was growing up, like everybody else in North Georgia. They both had uncles who made liquor or were known to frequent the best moonshiners when they got a thirst. My parents married in the sixties and started to move in circles where an occasional cocktail was served. A lady in town who was known for exceptional good graces and manners advised Mama to order a Tom Collins and sip it very slow, and throughout their social lives that became her go to. In my college days, I had the requisite fun that comes with matriculating in a southern university town. Go dogs. But if my parents knew, they never let on. I'm going to pick up this email from Holly and say after graduation, Mama sat me down and said, now, when you're at a cocktail party or a work function, order a Tom Collins and sip it really slow. She had no idea that I was much more educated when it came to cocktail choices, and I let it stay that way for the most part. Mama passed away in February the episode brought me a sweet memory of a story I've shared many times through the years. Sometime soon, I planned to have a Tom Collins in memory of both my parents. I don't have a pet right now, so I don't have a picture to share. I tried to find one of Blackie, mama's last cat. She showed up one Saturday morning and didn't leave for eighteen years. Daddy was a dog person, but that cat stole his heart too. Thanks for all the great and hard work. I hope y'all do a live show in Atlanta someday soon so I can meet you both in person. Rebecca Tracy picked that up because I got real weak about it. So I also read this email this morning, and it reminded me earlier in my life, when I was in college. I think I went to the beach with my mom and a couple of her sisters, and they wanted to make a thing they can they typically consumed on their beach trips, which they described as wine coolers. It was diet mountain dew mixed with white sefidel, and they were having trouble getting the cork out of the white zefandel, and I went and effortlessly took care of it, and there was a shared moment among my mom and her sisters in which they just sort of wordlessly acknowledged that I, their daughter slash niece, who they still saw as a child, knew how to operate a corkscrew. I love it. I love it. Good memories. We'll talk about that Diamount and Duo White z Evanel in a minute when we do behind the scenes. I have some thoughts, So if again, thank you so much for this email, and I want to send my condolences. You got me all choked up. It's so sweet. If you would like to email us, you can do that at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History, and if you have not subscribed yet, you can do that lickety split in the iHeartRadio app, or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.