Interactive Advent Calendars

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My childhood Advent calendar came from Joe’s Candy Cottage on the hill that sloped down to the Manhattan Beach pier.  A tiny shop that smelled deliciously of melting chocolate twelve months a year, Joe’s was even more irresistible to local kids in December, when they dropped by to admire the stocking stuffers imported from Europe in the glass vitrines and a menagerie of Steiff toys on the high shelves.

That calendar from Joe’s was discarded long ago, but it is still  my idea of  the perfect one –a snowy landscape with toys, woodland animals, stars, sweets and cunningly concealed flaps numbered from one to twenty-four,the whole surface lightly dusted with a veil of silver glitter.

That paper artifact is now another commodity that blows into the Christmas marketplace every year in a flurry of sizes, shapes, and materials incorporating different combinations of holiday motifs.  Some designs forgo the little flaps that open to reveal pictures of treats  for wooden drawers, which Mom and Dad have to fill with goodies.  Instant gratification trumps the cultivation of patience yet again.

The Cotsen collection’s cache of  what I assumed would be a selection of “traditional” European Advent calendars had more to offer than naked pink cherubs turning out sugary treats in a celestial bakery.  Instead of rolling out variations on the same old theme, some graphic designers and illustrators were more than happy to experiment with the format.

The publisher’s envelope for the Advent calendar, Das Christkind im Walde. [Germany] : R. & L.M., ca. 1930. (Cotsen 36764)

The envelope of Das Christkind im Walde illustrated in frosty blues promises the pleasure of creating a charming tableau between December 6th and the 24th.  The backdrop is a section of wintry forest with squirrels, rabbits and crows.  There are no flaps on the calendar, just numbers.  Each number has a corresponding tab on the back.

The numbered tabs on the back of the calendar. There is also a mostly illegible property stamp for a school in Prague. (Cotsen 36764)

As more tabs are turned during the passage of December, the scene fills up with angels carrying stars and lanterns.  On the twenty-third, St. Nicolas pops up in the lower right hand corner and the Christ child takes the center stage on Christmas Eve. Josef Mauder (1884-1969), the famous Bavarian illustrator of Jugendstil children’s books, designed an Advent calendar that required the child to do quite a bit more than find the flap with the day’s date on it, open it, and long for the thing pictured in the window.

The well-worn cover of the third printing of Josef Mauder’s Münchener Weinachts-Kalender, which probably dates around 1925. München: Reichhhold & Lang. (Cotsen 23275)

Each day, the child had to select the correct illustrated sticker and paste it in its proper space on the right page.  The Cotsen copy has been completed, so I am guessing there was an envelope containing the set of stickers, now discarded.  Each sticker tells the story of one stage of Peter and Liesel’s search for the Christ Child between December first and the twenty-fourth.  On the third day of the month, for example, they meet the Heinzelmann and ask for directions.  They see St. Nicholas on the fourth of December while trying to find the fifth tree in the sixth row the Heinzelmann told them to look for.

Last but not least, an audio-Advent calendar that predates the ones on the Internet by several decades.   Glade Jul, Dejlige Jul is one of those completely mad hybrids that designers create for children. The twenty-four flaps of the Advent calendar have been arranged around the circumference of a 45 r.p.m. record on laminated cardboard (ours is missing seven flaps).

Glade Jul, dejlige Jul = Santa Notte = Voici Noel = Silent Night, holy Night = Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht. [Copenhagen?]: L. Levinson Jr. Ltd., copyright [1965?]. (Cotsen 6844)

One way of playing with this object might be for the child to open the flaps and look at the loot in the windows, then to play the sound recording.  As the record spins, the children on the flaps appear to dance around the Christmas tree in the center, making Glade Jul is a relative of a phenatistoscope, or precursor of a GIF animation of a short continuous loop.   This novelty, with its parallel titles in five languages was probably intended for distribution in America, England and the Continent.

So don’t let the snow melt under your feet in the forest!  There are still nineteen flaps to open on the Advent calendar!

A London Birthday Party in Stephen Jones’ The Oracles (1792)

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One of the few eighteenth-century coaches to survive in original condition was this one, which belonged to the Beekman family coach around 1770.

Celebrating a child’s birthday at a social gathering was a late eighteenth-century trend that was rather controversial because it undercut the traditional Christian practice of reflecting on one’s life and choosing goals for the coming year.  Children’s books are an underutilized source for documenting the shift in attitudes towards birthdays and The Oracles, Containing some Particulars of the History of Billy and Kitty Wilson (London: E. Newbery, ca 1792) is a good example of showing a way to strike a balance between religious observance and fashionable entertainments.  It’s not a book that has received much scholarly attention, even though it was illustrated by John Bewick.  The author was probably Stephen Jones (1763-1827), who was Newbery family royalty, being the son of Giles Jones and nephew of Griffith Jones, who are believed to have collaborated with their employer and collaborator John Newbery on some of the firm’s most famous children’s books.

At the beginning of The Oracles, Mr. and Mrs. Wilson are mostly satisfied with the characters of their two children, except for their tendency to assume their judgement is as good as that of their parents.  While the Wilsons may take their responsibilities as parents very seriously, they are not so strict as all that, because on Billy’s seventh birthday, the family goes to London for a day of  sightseeing.  The high point of the day is to be a visit to the famous Speaking Figure, which could answer questions put to it in English, French, German and Italian between noon and nine o’clock in the evening, Monday through Saturday. Here are the Wilsons testing the Speaking Figure’s ability to communicate.  Billy is posing a question to the Figure by speaking into the trumpet inserted into its mouth.

For the Wilson party of four, admission was a shilling per person, which means attendance in the exhibition rooms was not nearly as expensive theater tickets–a single opera ticket would have cost 4 shillings.  But if Mr. Wilson were not sufficiently wealthy to keep his own coach, he also would have had to pay for round-trip transportation from their home in the country to the capital and after the Speaking Figure to their other destination, the Tower Zoo.  Zoo admission was six pence per person.  A meal in a tavern was probably also in order at some point during the outing as well.  Depending upon the family’s annual income,  Billy’s birthday outing may have taken a good portion of the Wilsons’ discretionary income for that month.

This fictional day trip was not the product of Jones’s imagination, but based on a London exhibition that had been on view between 1784 and 1786 and  attracted quite a bit of publicity.  The Frenchman who constructed the Speaking Figure imposed upon the public at major European cities by creating the illusion of conversations between doll and visitor with tubes concealed by the doll’s large feather headdress.  The deception was promptly exposed by Phillip Thicknesse in a pamphlet, which is illustrated with this diagram, showing how the figure operated.

So where does Stephen Jones stand on the question of birthday celebrations?  From one perspective, he tried to have his cake and eat it too.  The Wilsons did not take Billy and Kitty to gawk at the Speaking Figure, but to prepare them to participate in a  plan conceived to correct their most serious fault with minimal intervention from their parents.  Billy and Kitty’s delight in the Speaking Figure is so great that the Wilsons promise to install in the house two speaking figures, who will serve as the children’s personal advisors.

Experiences at home and at school quickly teach Billy and Kitty that their oracles always had their best interests in mind and after a few trials, they trust the oracles so much that they follow the figures’ advice to the letter.  At that point, Mr. and Mrs. Wilson step up and reveal that they have been voicing the so-called oracles from the very beginning, with the result that the children transfer their trust to their parents, where it should have been all along.

Jones was on thin ice here.   He seems to have been leaning towards the approach of French educators like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Mme de Genlis, who justified the deception of children if the ends of a ruse justified the means.  On the other hand, Jones is also suggesting that a birthday celebration that is both entertaining and improving is appropriate.   It  seems to have been possible for the day to be associated with pleasure as well as reflection and moral growth–at least at some remove from the big day.