Advent is anticipation, a period of waiting, a dark period. In the Middle Ages, people lit candles on wheel-shaped bundles of evergreen. These Advent wreaths gave comfort as people looked forward to the longer days ahead. In the Christian tradition, Advent is a time devoted to the preparations for Christmas, commencing on the first Sunday after November 26. The Advent calendar, a tradition started in Germany in the beginning of the 19th century, offered another method of counting down the days to the celebration of Christmas (Weihnachten). The first printed calendar, produced by Gerhard Lang in 1908, consisted of miniature colored pictures that would be attached to a piece of cardboard each day in December. Later, Advent calendars were made with little doors to open on each day. Behind each door, the child might find a small piece of candy, a Christmas picture, a religious picture or a bible verse. The sampling of Advent calendars on this page is part of larger collection that Pacific Palisades resident Sigrid Hofer collected throughout the childhood of her two adult sons, Manfred and Tom (Palisadian-Post graphic artists). A child herself during World War II, Hofer grew up in Alveslohe, a small village in the Schleswig-Holstein region of Germany, near Hamburg. While her own family was not particularly devout, they did honor the traditions of Christmas by lighting a candle each week on the Advent wreath, making simple crafts and singing songs. ’On Christmas Eve, my parents put up the tree in a room which was off limits to us children, locked with big double doors,’ Hofer says. ‘They decorated it with candles, balls, metal ornaments, tinsel, candy and cookies,’ she remembers with delight the surprise awaiting her and her two sisters, Gisela and Renate, when at last allowed to enter the room on Christmas Eve. ’Our Christmas was simple, it was during the war,’ says Hofer, who immigrated to the United States in 1957. ‘We might have received a doll or new clothes for the dolls. Maybe mother would make us a new nightgown or sweater.’ A tradition that Sigrid did enjoy was the celebration of St. Nikolaus Day on December 6. In Germany, Nikolaus is usually celebrated on a small scale. Many children put a shoe called Nikolaus-Stiefel (Nikolaus boot) outside the front door or on the windowsill on the night of December 5. St. Nikolaus fills the boot with gifts and sweets. Hofer recalls that on certain years, if it snowed excessively, the shoe would have to be put out twice. Christmas was celebrated on December 24 with a Christmas Eve dinner comprised of traditional dishes of roasted meat, a sweet bread and marzipan. From the start of Advent, a weihnachtsmarkt was set up in the town where everything one needed for Christmas was sold: decorations for the tree, candles, crib figures, along with foodstuffs’gingerbread, sausages and roasted chestnuts. Hofer and her sisters did not share the tradition of the Advent calendar when they were growing up, but Hofer and her husband Arnold initiated the Advent tradition in their home with calendars that her sisters sent the Hofer boys each year. This year, Hofer received a four-part, accordion-shaped calendar depicting a townscape, which she plans to use as a backdrop for her own ceramic Dickens’ Christmas village collection that she started over a dozen years ago.
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