Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Let’s talk about advent calendars.

Even when your family is Jewish, you still learn a lot about Christmas. How can you not? Despite having no direct experience with this, the most important of Christian holidays, I still got most of the details by sheer exposure. Trees, presents, ornaments, eggnog, large fat reverse-burglar clad in red, carols, and somewhere in there, Jesus. I understood all these things by the third grade.

Advent calendars, however, escaped my notice and comprehension until just last year. You see, that’s the year that Leslie Harpold, prominent graphic designer, writer, and apparently wonderful human being, passed away. For those who knew her (and unfortunately I’m not one of them), the tip-off was that her annual online advent calendar abruptly stopped on December 7th. This, I think we can all agree, is a pretty morbid introduction to the concept of an advent calendar. They are typically filled with chocolate and little toys, you see, not death and mourning.

Anyway, an advent calendar, as I understand it, is a sort of Countdown to Christ. It’s not the kind of thing I’m going to step out and buy for the holiday season. However, if one is offered to me, I’ve got no problem with playing along. If nothing else, it’s a reason to have a piece of chocolate every day.

Wouldn’t you know it, one was offered to me this year. The Midwestern One gave a calendar to each of her roommates. It is a thin box of glossy cardboard. The front features an oil painting rendition of a kindly Santa in the process of examining a globe. A book of names is in his one hand, while the other points intensely at what I believe to be Alabama. Santa the Superego. Perforated squares are randomly arranged over the tableau of Herr Claus, each a tiny door that conceals a chocolate-

Here I enter dangerous waters. The polite thing to do would be to complete the sentence above with the word “treat.” This, however, traps me between the commandments of “Thou Shalt Not Tell Falsehoods on Thine Website” and “Thou Shalt Not Insult Thine Friends, No Matter How Indirectly, on Thine Website”. To describe these chocolates as “treats” would be a lie. In fact, describing them as chocolate would probably be a lie. They are some kind of Grade F sweetener paste that has been extruded into amusing shapes and colored brown. These are designed to give the eater the illusion of chocolate. We’re talking sub-gelt level here, and I could eat gelt (pictured) until time stops.

I of course mean no disrespect to The Midwestern One. She had only the most festive of intentions. It’s just that one should not have to concentrate to taste the sugar. It’s not her fault. I have no one but myself to blame for keeping up with the calendar and consuming every “morsel.” I just hate to leave things half-finished.