Advent Calendars Trivia Quiz

Answer: Quakers

While broadly speaking any public Christian service can be called a liturgy, the term liturgical is used to designate churches whose services are highly structured, with a fixed sequence of events that includes prescribed prayers and hymns which vary with the time of year. Such churches (which include a number of Eastern Orthodox churches in addition to the ones named in the question) typically place emphasis on ceremony, and observe a number of rituals which vary through the year, according to the liturgical calendar. The development of the Advent calendar is an example of this.

While it is not what one thinks of immediately when considering an Advent calendar, there is a custom (in buildings large enough to have 24 or more windows) of decorating the windows with special coverings to turn them into a large-scale Advent calendar. This image shows an example from Budapest.

Answer: Both of these

While many associate the season primarily with the feast of Christmas to which it is the precursor, many of the prayers (and often sermons) during Advent are set to remind the community that Christ will come again. In Western churches, Advent was traditionally one of the two seasons during which new converts prepared themselves for baptism and full entry into the church (the other one being Lent).

This added a third sense in which Advent anticipates an arrival - the arrival of a new member of the church following their acceptance of Christ.

Answer: False

The date for the start of Advent varies with different churches, but the majority consider it to start on the fourth Sunday before Christmas. This means that it can be on any date between 27 November and 3 December. However, when Advent calendars began to be mass produced, it was awkward to have a different number of days each year, which meant that the whole thing needed to be redesigned annually.

It made sense to standardise the calendars to start on the first day of December, and finish on either the 24th or the 25th, depending on the calendar design.

Answer: Germany

German Lutherans have always celebrated the Advent and Christmas season very enthusiastically, and are responsible for the widespread adoption of practices now almost universally associated with the season: Advent wreaths, Advent candles, Advent and Christmas cookies, Nativity tableaux, and, of course, the Christmas tree. I would add Christmas hymns and carols, but those have been developed independently in most countries, integrating Christian concepts with earlier local traditions. Each of these has religious significance, and the same is true of the Advent calendar, which was originally developed as a daily ritual to remind the faithful of the significance of the season.

Answer: In the early part of the 19th century

A traditional Advent calendar consists (they're still around) of two pieces of paper or cardboard fastened together. The top layer has small windows - flaps that are cut on three sides so that they can be bent along the hinged side to reveal what is behind them.

The top layer's decoration provides the calendar's theme - and they can be religious or secular, as witnessed by some of the images used for this quiz. The bottom layer has the images to be revealed on it, in the appropriate spots. Again, the earliest calendars were religious in theme, modern calendars often less so.

Answer: A picture of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

They were developed to be part of religious devotions, after all! The early ones were sometimes hand-made, with the creator handwriting an inspirational message to be hidden behind each window, or creating drawings of events and people associated with the Nativity.

As calendars gained a more widespread popularity, the windows evolved to reveal a wider range of images suitable to the season, such as snow scenes, and pictures of toys and food - not to mention Santa and his elves!

Answer: Generally, there is none

While I remember the calendars of my childhood as having the days in order, so that we opened the windows across the bottom row, then the next, and so on, I actually don't see many around in recent years that are so simple. Instead, the numbers are randomly numbered, giving the participants an extra bit of anticipation as they seek the right number. And, as you will see from some of the images in this quiz, they can be arranged quite randomly! Their location may be planned to have a specific visual impact when they are all opened, but the sequence is rarely significant. (Neither is the relative size of the window when there is size variation for artistic reasons.)

Answer: It can contain a small gift for each day

The example here doesn't have windows, so the gifts all need to be wrapped to provide the traditional suspense of wondering what will be revealed each day. Commercially-produced gift Advent calendars tend to have much smaller and evenly-sized objects than this example - a chocolate coin or a small plastic novelty item that fits into a small space behind the window. I suspect the book calendar used for Question 3 was an example of this - it looks as if each day is actually a small box, holding some hidden treat.

Answer: To include the Christmas celebration which is at the core of the Advent season

Just as people who create Advent calendars can start them on the date of their choice (usually choosing the actual date of the First Sunday, if diverging from the more common 1 December), they can also finish when they choose. There are those who feel the calendar should end when Advent does, and others who feel the inclusion of Christmas puts the finishing touch on the project. If it matters to you, you should be able to find a calendar to match your desires in the multitude on offer each year.

Answer: Polandball

Polandball is a meme in which the user creates their drawing with characters who are roundish blobs bearing the colors of a nation's flag. Originally, they were Polish, hence the name - which is used even when the Polish flag is not one of those in the image.

In online comics, they are often used to poke fun at national stereotypes. The humor can be quite heavy-handed, and is often based on traditional tensions between countries, as seen in this example using the United Kingdom, Germany and Austria.

They make a lot more sense if you can work out the countries!