Long Distance Advent Calendar: 3 Ways to Deliver It

You already have fourteen ideas written down, three you actually like. What's stopping you isn't the fifteenth. Your real question is the one you find too dumb to ask anyone out loud: how does a long distance advent calendar actually reach them? One surprise a day, December 1 through 24, with an ocean in the middle.

Underneath it sits the fear that a late package says something about your ability to be there. It says nothing, and all of it gets settled before December. Distance complicates the trip, not the gesture.

The question that decides it

There are only three routes, and one question sorts them: does what you want to give them fit in a file, in a box, or in both? A letter read out loud fits in a file. A scarf that smells like your place does not.

Read the "what can break" column first: across a whole month, that's the one that decides, never the price.

The all-digital calendar

You build the twenty-four days in November, a date on each one, and on December 1 there's nothing left for you to do: they get a link, the doors open one at a time.

This route settles at once everything that scares you elsewhere: no transit, no customs, an opening date nobody can work around. It doesn't even need a mailing address, which matters if they're between apartments.

Nothing forces you to write it all before December 1, you can fill door 18 on the 12th, and that's exactly why you decide now not to: an empty day only shows at the moment it opens. Aim for everything ready on November 30, day 19 included, the one you have no idea about yet.

For your son who took the job in Singapore, the video of his grandmother, filmed on a Sunday afternoon in November, will wait until December 14. And it's the only route still open on November 30, when the others have been closed for two weeks.

The box you send early

The twenty-four numbered envelopes, and what goes in them for him and for her, you already have. What's missing is the dates.

Shipping an advent calendar answers a different deadline than Christmas does. The box has to be in their hands by the evening of November 30. The cutoffs USPS posts every fall aim at the tree on December 25, and even the international ones, the earliest on the whole list, would land your box somewhere in the middle of your own calendar.

Ballpark figures, worth checking again each November: within the country, a few days to a week; internationally, one to three weeks, and longer to the far side of the world or anywhere the last leg is a small plane. For a package around a pound, figure $20 to $40 to Canada or Mexico, $30 to $60 to Europe, and up from there for Asia and Australia. Which means dropping it off in the first half of November if there's an ocean, earlier still if there are two.

Number the envelopes, don't date them. A box that lands on December 4 loses nothing, and the whole question of starting on the 1st or on the first Sunday of Advent stops mattering: the calendar starts when the box opens.

After that it's all decided by the ounce, and it's where a couple split between Denver and Melbourne stalls: a printed photo crosses the planet for almost nothing, a scented candle eats the postage. Weigh the box full before you tape it shut, and you'll know what has to travel by screen.

A box for weight, digital for dates

One rule covers it: the box carries whatever has weight (an object, paper, a smell), the screen carries whatever has a date (your voice, a video, the morning's words). One shipment, twenty-four appointments, and the mail no longer has to be punctual.

They just have to talk to each other, and the day's door handles that: it carries the message, or a number, "open envelope 7". They look at their phone, the box follows.

For a friend who just moved to Lisbon: numbered handwritten letters in the box, and the photo of your street taken that same morning, opening while you're asleep.

What actually breaks a long distance calendar

What brings a long distance calendar down has nothing to do with what you put inside it (thirty ideas for a couple a thousand miles apart are waiting on the blog). Three blind spots, rather.

Their time zone, not yours

"Morning" isn't an hour, it's a place. A message sent at eight from Denver arrives at two in the morning in Melbourne, and the most tender thing you do all month becomes a buzz that wakes them up (they won't tell you).

Set yourself on their clock: pick a slot in their day, 7 a.m. or 8 p.m., and hold it for twenty-four days.

Trust, when nothing locks

How do you know they haven't opened everything on December 3? The honest answer has two branches: either the calendar holds the door shut, or you decide this isn't yours to control and you stop thinking about it the day the box ships.

The economist George Loewenstein showed back in the late eighties that people will pay to delay a pleasure: the waiting is part of it. The order matters more to you than to them, and if they open the lot on the 3rd, read it as impatience for you.

The box that shows up on December 6

A box shipped on time can still land on the 6th, December congestion is enough on its own. Plan the catch-up before you tape the lid: write on the inside that if it runs late, they open everything they missed that same evening, then pick the rhythm back up.

Six envelopes opened back to back make for a more generous first night. What leaves a bad taste is finding out that nothing had been planned for it.

The transit times and the postage, you'll have forgotten them by January. What stays is that someone, eight thousand miles away, is going to wake up twenty-four mornings in a row knowing there's something there for them. Maybe they'll open the whole thing at once on some low evening, and it'll work anyway: you'll have counted the days backwards one Sunday in November, to land exactly right.