Santa comes tonight! For the penultimate Advent calendar of 2024, I returned to Solgarden in Mebane, North Carolina. They sell a really neat looking Countdown to Christmas which is 3-D printed and extremely clever.
The main structure is a red chimney. At the very top stands Santa Claus. Throughout the length of the chimney, there are these green planks that are numbered 1-24. Each day, you remove the plank with the corresponding number until on the 24th where you remove the final piece and Santa Claus plops right down into the fire place.
It's rather brilliant. I'm not sure who manufactured it and I think the asking price was around $50.
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This calendar is very similar to the piece that inspired this year's theme. It's a wooden countdown of Nakatomi Plaza from the Bruce Willis holiday classic Die Hard. Starting from the top, the numbers start at 1 with 24 at the very bottom. Each day, as you get closer to Christmas Eve, you take the small figure of Alan Rickman's villainous Hans Gruber just a little bit closer towards going splat onto the parking lot below. As my brother in law says 'It's not Christmas until Hans Gruber falls off of Nakatomi Plaza.' With this Advent, he'd be right.
Before I dive into my Batman Advent gift for the day, I want to explain why I didn't choose to focus on the Die Hard advent yesterday or any other day. Why the honorable mention of sorts? Originally I was going to feature the Hans Gruber calendar for the 23rd and today be about Santa as I normally do. But as I got to thinking about it, I didn't want to feature two nearly identical concepts back-to-back. A last minute editorial call, I switched things up to keep things from getting stale. I hope you'll forgive my indulgence and enjoyed my picks regardless.
