Christmas traditions in Japan: the advent calendar

The celebration of Christmas in Japan is not religious. There are relatively few Christians in Japan. To put it very simply, the holiday was appropriated for its commercial value. However, despite that, many of the Christmas traditions in my home country weren't adopted here. But there are some that were, such as the advent calendar. 

When I first came to Japan more than 20 years ago, you could buy advent calendars but they were much harder to find and much more expensive than they are now. Even 15 years ago when my eldest was a baby I had to travel to Tokyo or an Ikea to get a reasonably priced advent calendar. Kaldi did sell them at that stage, but they were for a maturer market. Plus they sold out very quickly.

Thankfully since about ten years ago Advent Calendars became much more widely available and priced more affordably. Moreover, there is a much better choice. Around that time, I think it was 2015, I started seeing the Lego Advent Calendars online and in the Lego stores. I did buy them for several years in a row for my children. It became one of our Christmas traditions and the kids looked forward to their Lego Advent calendars each year.

My kids are getting older now. Last year, I got the older two chocolate advent calendars and the younger two Lego calendars. But this year I decided to get all four of them chocolate calendars. Its got to the point that there is such a wide selection of calendars its hard to chose! In the end I settled on Snoopy, because Snoopy is a kind of symbol between our family and a group of three other families we are very close to. 

I got them on Amazon with my City-cost points! They were 1100 yen each. Which is much cheaper than the Lego advent calendars, but I thought was expensive for the Snoopy calendars because there is only 24 small chocolates in them! I should have shopped around, because I've since seen the exact same advent calendars in the stores too. And they were actually 300 yen cheaper than what I paid!

Obviously many people also get advent calendars for Christmas in Japan nowadays, because the stores have risen to meet the demand and you can literally buy them in thousands of novelty and food stores around Japan! Most of them are for 24 or 25 days, but you can get ones for 30 days too. You can also get non food ones or just empty containers for making your own advent calendar, which is something I used to do with the kids when they were small. No matter what type of advent calendar you opt for, its a nice Christmas tradition to have.

Do you buy or make advent calendars at Christmas?