A few years ago, we bought a wooden advent calendar with little doors concealing magnetic figures that can be arranged on a nativity scene:
Last year during Advent I set myself a poetic challenge: I would hide a slip of paper behind the door with each figure, and on that paper would be a rhyming couplet that said something about the figure; all the couplets together would form a coherent poem to be recited on Christmas Eve when the last door had been opened. I had to think ahead about the best order for the figures, taking into account that the biggest ones could not fit behind the littlest doors. But once the order was set, I wrote the couplets day by day, scrambling each evening to prepare the morning’s rhyme. Some mornings I made excuses to delay the morning Advent Calendar ritual and buy extra time to write!
Once the first stanza was done, my friend Peter Kwasniewski composed a Gregorian chant setting for it, in the one-note-one-syllabus style of a liturgical “sequence” like the Victimae paschali. The “Advent sequence” was a success, and the melody haunting: you can read and decide for yourself here. If you are not familiar with Gregorian chant notation, you can listen to my rendition of it here:
