When I was a little kid and Christmas rolled around every year, I was more than just excited. Everything about the holiday – the gifts, the tree, the holiday spirit – made December a special month. One of the classic moments that would mark the beginning of the season wasn’t the huge, decorated Christmas tree or the sudden snow days; it was the opening of the seasonal advent calendar that my family would buy every year. Every little decorated window for each day leading up to the 25th would only heighten my excitement for opening bigger things, like presents.
Traditionally, Advent calendars are large, calendar-like boxes that house openable sections and pockets often containing daily pieces of candy or chocolate that are opened throughout the countdown to Christmas. Different brands chose to release an advent calendar this Christmas. What used to be chocolate Santas and snowflakes were replaced with merchandise from popular brands like Sephora, Chanel, Netflix, Bloomingdale’s, Charlotte Tilbury, Pokémon, Dior and more.
So when did a classic holiday tradition like Advent calendars become a trendy holiday buy, and why has almost every brand endorsed it and used it to promote their products? From Glamour magazine, author Tanya Tianyi Chen summed it up to one thing: using tradition as a branding tool. “While many companies may not yield a significant return on investment, the calendar serves as a fun, cheeky way to engage their most loyal customers and to acquire new ones who want to dip a toe into their products. After all, who doesn’t love unboxing?”
An example of the wide variety of brands that adopted this branding strategy was Needoh, a fidget toy company that released their Squishmas Needoh Advent Calendar in 2024. Junior Jia Micalizzi bought one for Christmas after seeing it repeatedly unboxed on TikTok and reviewed. “I saw so many videos of it, so I wanted to get it and see what different fidgets it would have. I didn’t want to wait each day to open a new one so I opened it all at once, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that they were really fun when I first opened them all. I’m used to bigger Needoh’s, but the calendar gave me a bunch of small ones with different textures, which I hadn’t seen before. I like to keep them in my car in case one of my friends wants to look or play with them,” Micalizzi said.
Another popular brand that followed in this trend was Sephora, which came out with a Sephora Collection Advent calendar, featuring a similar 24-count of merchandise offered to purchasers. Although the calendar may have seemed like a smart deal to save money on beauty products, the calendar received mixed reviews due to its cost and addition of merchandise. Junior Gabi Estrada originally wanted the calendar due to its popularity and countless unboxing videos, but ultimately decided against it due to the actual products that it offered. “I did want to buy it because I saw so many people reviewing the different types of makeup products that it has, but when I went to buy it I realized that some of the products were things like tweezers and hair ties, which I already have and seemed like a bit of a waste of money. Advent calendars are fun, but I would rather open up things that I would genuinely want instead of paying a lot of money for random products that I could get anywhere,” Estrada said.
