The Advent calendar, which is now indispensable during the Advent season, only came into existence at the beginning of the 20th century.
~However, the actual origins can be traced back to the 19th century. The first forms of the Advent calendar come from the Protestant environment.
In religious families, 24 pictures were gradually hung on the wall in December. Simple but no less effective was another variant: 24 chalk marks painted on the wall or door, from which the children were allowed to wipe one away each day (so-called tally calendars).
Or straws were placed in a nativity scene, one for each day until Christmas Eve.
>Other forms include the Christmas clock, or an Advent candle that was allowed to burn down to the next mark each day. The probably earliest form of a homemade Advent calendar dates back to 1851. Those who wanted to order an Advent calendar had to be a little more patient: In 1902, the Evangelical Bookstore in Hamburg published probably the first printed Advent calendar: a Christmas clock for children, which in handling is absolutely comparable to the one that appeared in 1922 at the St. Johannis printing house (Dominik Wunderlin, lic.phil Switzerland).
In 1904, the "Neues Tagblatt Stuttgart" included a Christmas calendar as a gift. However, the Lower Austrian State Museum gives the year 1903 as the year of origin of the printed Advent calendar.
