I am usually quite a stickler for tradition when it comes to advent calendars: I don’t like chocolate, Santa, North Pole animals wearing clothes, excess glitter, mini bottles of alcohol (just give me one large bottle) and DEFINITELY not Disney characters (shudder).

I like plain, normal windows with no weird gimmicks and genuine midwinter symbols with pagan roots, such as mistletoe, holly and deer. I even once went through a phase of buying a special winter solstice advent calendar every year, despite the two notions not really being compatible, but I eventually stopped buying when it dawned on me that it was essentially fewer windows (it stopped at 21) for double or triple the price of a normal advent calendar.

These windows in my current calendar certainly defy tradition, as cats aren’t usually a Yuletide phenomenon (apart from this scary Icelandic one who eats naughty children: https://www.iizcat.com/post/4373/The-Christmas-Cat-of-Iceland-a-giant-terrifying-cat-that-gobbles-up-children-if-they-039-re-bad). Yet I am sure you will see why I found them very pleasing indeed: