Introducing Sadie's 13-Day DEADvent Calendar

I wanted to celebrate Christmas properly and get the blog festive this year to make up for the blah December I had last year.  

After a series of things feeling off or going wrong, my month had been brutally capped off by a bout of COVID-19 days before the 25th that canceled all of my actual Christmas activities. 2023 was my worst-ever holiday season with absolutely no contest, and I want to make this one great. I had some Christmas LDD items planned to discuss, and then I got a little tabletop chest of drawers at IKEA and thought...why not make an Advent calendar out of it? 

The Advent calendar was a cherished tradition in my childhood--the classic formula is usually 24 doors opened day by day in December starting from the 1st, and the contents can be chocolates or toys, or even just images under flaps on a card. I was lucky enough to have a pretty extravagant and personalized setup. My house had a beautiful wooden empty tabletop Advent calendar with twenty-five doors (the proper number in my book) in uniform small square cubbyholes, and without fail, the Advent elf would visit and fill a door overnight for me to discover a treat in the morning. My mom worked so hard to bring that magic to life, writing notes from the elf and constructing a character and lore for him, and she often pulled out my favorite showstopper--"follow the ribbon". For gifts too big to fit in the small compartments of the calendar, I would be greeted with a long ribbon hanging out the door, and it was a game to follow its path around the house until I reached the package tied to the end! I adored the Advent calendar and my elf, and I was such a pure, sweet child that I insisted on putting gifts for him in the calendar, which my mom dutifully secreted away in a safe deposit box so my gesture could never be undermined by discovering them hidden! (Those resurfaced toys were small desktop comforts during my isolation last year.) It was magic, and while I eventually aged out of Santa and the calendar and the elf, I treasure that experience.

This Advent celebration will not be so wholesome, but it's entirely in good fun.

The chest of drawers was an IKEA piece bought in early summer, and I wasn't thinking of it as an Advent calendar until I realized the Christmas LDD topics I was thinking about could be dressed up into a calendar, and even expanded through that structure. Thinking of it as a calendar gave me more focus and ideas, too, and I decided to anchor it around Sadie, the mascot who sparked my LDD journey through her Return doll.

Now, even if budget was no consideration, I would not have been able to do a full twenty-five days because there isn't enough small LDD paraphernalia that captures my interest and I'd end up making things a little repetitive and forced at that quota. Thirteen, however, was a proper spooky number I could fill out with ideas. End date would still be Christmas, of course, which was kind of beautiful and perfect because the start date is...December 13! And it's a Friday the 13th this year! We're leading up to a big ticket here, but there are going to be multiple things I genuinely wanted within this calendar, and there's not just one big prize in store. To make the chest work for this purpose, I've divided it so the small drawers feature multiple gifts by number. I'll start with the smaller loose gift on top, then go dipping into the chest once per day until each drawer is emptied, and move to the next until I open the coffin on the top!

In designing the calendar, almost everything was finalized days before, save for a few items I ordered in advance to have ready. I knew the final gift would be what it was (a wrapped coffin of someone on top) because a coffin won't fit in the calendar, and I also had the idea of putting another gift as a wrapped present on top to start the sequence, creating a bookended structure. That made it easy to leave two gifts in each of the smaller drawers and one in the large drawer. It made me think a lot about the pacing and "narrative" of an Advent calendar and the potential for a balanced, exciting experience. 

Physically, I painted the chest black and I had done so right after getting it, but I then added the final decorations this very week. I went for more of a retro painted-wood-toy tone for the design, and kept the colors pink, white, black and grey to match the original LDD branding and Sadie herself. The color palette is also itself very retro, connoting Christmases of the 1950s and '60s, and it matches Sadie's retro aesthetic too. I painted the little sign plaque, tracing the "DEAD" from the LDD logo to make the pun title clearer and used an abstract holly-leaf-and-berries design for the sulfur symbol on top. I also dated the plaque--not because I plan to do this concept again another year, but so I can commemorate this season. I may repaint the chest and repurpose it after DEADvent, but I'll keep the plaque and lacquer it in polyurethane to have as a memento of this project. 

I glued the plaque on, and then added grey trim to the drawers. The drawers on the top two shelves have no dividers between them and sit tight next to each other, so I drew grey lines across their inner edges to visually divide them and match the rest more. The numbers were scrawled-on child-style with white colored pencil, and I painted spooky Christmas graphics in pink, white, and grey on each drawer. Finally, I tied a pink bow around the top of the chest to make it more gifty. 

I'll be super honest and tell you that whether I was doing this feature in full, or at all, was really down to the wire, and even as I was fortunate enough to be able to arrange a full thirteen-day calendar's worth of content, it was up in the air what would be arriving when and precisely what my order of items would be--this calendar didn't have the timing to be pre-packed fully, and my choice for the first gift was completely unclear until today. I'll be able to keep it on track, though.

I'll be opening and posting day by day in brief blog posts, including the full review on smaller items, while larger topics will get their own posts within this month (or before Christmas if they need to). I'll also be updating the Instagram day by day to have the opening feature there in timely fashion too.

The series starts tomorrow! Happy DEADvent!