What to write in an advent calendar

You have the calendar. Now there are twenty-four empty spaces and the first one opens in a fortnight. Here is what actually goes in them.

The hard part of a homemade advent calendar was never the calendar. It is sitting down with twenty-four blanks and realising that you know exactly why you love someone and have no idea how to write it down twenty-four separate times.

Two things make it easier, and neither is inspiration. The first is knowing that a door does not have to be profound — most of them should not be. The second is having the twenty-four split into groups before you start, so you are never choosing from everything at once.

The one rule that matters

Name the evidence, not the quality. “You are so thoughtful” is a compliment, and the reader has heard it before. “You remembered the name of the dog I mentioned once in August” is the same thought, and only one person in the world could have received it.

That is the whole difference between a calendar that gets read once and one that gets kept. Specific is not the same as clever — it is just the detail you would have left out because it seemed too small. It never is.

Twenty-four prompts, in four groups

Six in each. Work down them in any order and skip anything that does not fit: a prompt you have to force is a door that will read as forced.

Things only you would know

The strongest four or five in any calendar come from here, and they are the ones that cannot be bought. Specific beats generous every time: a habit they would deny having lands harder than a paragraph about how kind they are.

A habit they would swear they do not have
Something they say so often you could do the voice
The daftest thing you have both laughed at this year
A thing they are weirdly, disproportionately good at
The way they are first thing in the morning
Something they did once that you still bring up

Things you do together

Not the holidays. The Tuesday things — the walk you always take, the argument about the thermostat, the order you always get. A reader of these in December is remembering an ordinary evening, which is the point.

The thing you always end up doing on a free evening
A journey you have made together more times than you can count
Something you are both unreasonably competitive about
The meal one of you always makes
A plan you keep making and never doing
The last time you properly laughed together

What they are like

One trait per door, and name the evidence rather than the trait. "You are kind" is a compliment; "you never let anyone stand on their own at a party" is a reason.

What they are like when something goes wrong
The thing they do for other people without being asked
How they are with someone who is having a bad day
Something they have never once complained about
A way they are braver than they think they are
What they notice that nobody else does

How they have changed things

Save two of these for the end of the month. They carry more weight than the rest and a calendar that opens at full volume has nowhere left to go.

Something you can do now because of them
A way you are different since you met
What you would miss first if they were away
Something you have never said out loud
Why it is them, with no explanation attached
The thing you want them to know on Christmas Eve

When you get to the eighteenth and run dry

Everybody does, usually in the high teens. Three things that work:

Go smaller, not bigger. The instinct is to reach for something weightier. The fix is the opposite — a single observed detail, one line long, with nothing added to it.
Look at your photographs. Not for the big days. Scroll to an ordinary week and write about what you can see them doing in it.
Write the last one first. If door twenty-four is already written, the rest stop having to carry the ending.

Practical bits

Length should vary. If every door is the same size, the whole month reads at one volume. Mix one-liners with three or four longer ones.
Do not open every door on the biggest material. Door one sets the tone; it does not have to be the best one you have.
Write them all before you fill any. Reading them as a set is the only way to catch the three that are secretly the same reason.
Start in November. Twenty-four of anything takes longer than you think, and the ones written in a rush are the ones that sound like it.

We make a digital version of this — the questions, your photographs, and twenty-four doors that open one a morning — but every prompt above works just as well with paper, envelopes and a pen.