The Christmas countdown that captures my family’s year

American journalist, author and podcaster Linda Rodriguez McRobbie has built a career exploring the quirks of science, history and human nature. Now based in England, she continues to uncover the extraordinary in the everyday.

When our kids were born, my husband and I had a lot of earnest ideas about the kinds of traditions we wanted to create as a family. Some of these were the kinds of things you come up with before you’ve fully collided with the realities of parenting, like limiting the number of birthday gifts to a sensible three (one from each parent, one from both of us), and nothing plastic.

 Those fell spectacularly at the very first hurdle. Although now that our eldest is 14, he really just wants money. But there has been one tradition that has survived not only teenaged disaffection but also the shiny lure of commercialism, the ennui of the pandemic years and even the gravitational pull of procrastination. 

Now, my husband swears that he came up with the original idea and I swear it was me, but the fact was, we both wanted to DIY a Christmas advent calendar. We put it off while our first child was still a bit too young to understand the concept, but when he reached the age of three, it was clear we needed to start something before we just defaulted to chocolate. We knew we didn’t want something that involved sweets or toys – we wanted something simple, an easy tradition that we could pull off every year, but that had meaning.

 We were also in the grips of a mania that has affected all parents since the rise of digital photography – there are more photos of our first child in the first three years of his life than exist of me full stop. This affliction had only gotten worse with the birth of our second child, whose appearance in the world that year had heralded an exponential growth in the number of photos living on my phone. I’d started getting square photos printed in batches, clipping them to string to hang garlands of our memories around the house, propping them up on shelves, using them as bookmarks.

So a photo advent calendar seemed obvious. And ultimately, it doesn’t really matter who came up with the idea (it was me, it was totally me). Like most of the best things we still do, we built on it together until it became ours. Each day, our kids would take turns opening a numbered envelope containing a photo from the preceding year. They would place the picture on a special Christmas tree and by the end of the advent season, we’d have a collage of all things we’d done, where we’d been and how we’d grown.

The first iteration of the tree was a piece of tree-shaped cardboard painted green with paints from the kids’ crafting box and strung with fairy lights. We stuck it to the wall at three-year-old height. The first envelopes were actually striped paper sweetie bags I’d bought at the local pound shop. The first picture my son taped to the cardboard tree – carefully pressing it in the exact middle and then poking it with a stick – was actually a photo of a photo. It was a large square print of me holding a souvenir photo from that summer, when Transport for London set up a viewing village for the Tour de France in St James Park – our family of four piled on a stationary bike in front of a backdrop of a peloton of cyclists in the final stretch down the Mall. The picture was one of our favourites, a rare one of all of us together.

By Christmas morning, that photo was joined by 24 others, from our epic six-week journey crisscrossing America to attend two weddings and see all the friends and family we could in between; of our eldest child’s first bike ride (just out of the frame is his uncle, holding the bike upright); baby naps with the cat; water fights in the garden. That first year, I struggled to limit our photos to only 25. In fact, I didn’t. I jammed two to three photos into each envelope, telling my husband, “It’s OK, we’ll just choose which one goes on the tree!” (This worked out about as well as you might imagine.)

That first year was a proof of concept; over the next few, we refined it. We settled on mini squares prints and I sourced red and green envelopes that fit them perfectly and bought in bulk. My husband made a flat wooden tree, painted white and mounted on a stand, dotted with pegs to hang the photos from. To solve the issue of 25 days and two children to split them between, we decided that the last day wouldn’t be a photo at all, but a golden star for the top of the tree. After Christmas, the tree is packed away and we paste the photos in an album.

There have been years where I scrambled to get the photos printed in time – last year, I didn’t make it and our advent started nearly a week late. There have been years when, bowing to pressure from the chocolate lobby (that would be me), we supplemented with store-bought chocolate advent calendars. A few years ago, we even relaxed the ban on toys because the Lego Star Wars calendar was just too good.

The memories in the photos aren’t exclusively happy – they include the beloved pets who died, the holidays haunted by the ghosts of arguments, the moments of defeat (for example, a picture of the consolation hotdog I ate after not finishing a long swim I’d trained months for). As my children are getting older, the parade of photos is almost bittersweet; how much they’ve grown up and away from us in just the space of a year.

But what has remained a constant is the joy of recollecting, even difficult times. The advent pictures tell the story of a year, the ups and downs and remind us that through it all, we’re still together. That we still not only love each other but perhaps even more shockingly, we actually like each other, too. And that’s a pretty wonderful Christmas gift.