Greggs Advent Calendar

Once upon a time advent calendars existed to make little children eat a chocolate a day from December 1st to Christmas Day. They contained small chocolates, sometimes in the shape of Santa, and the real fun arrived with the selection box in the Christmas sack. These contained full-sized chocolate bars and usually had a game printed on the back of the box.

More recently toy manufacturers have got into the advent calendar racket. Lego, I have you in mind! They have become bigger, more extravagant, and more expensive. Auo and Naa used to like Lego advent calendars: City or Friends respectively.Last week in Itis, I saw that Playmobil have joined in now, along with a manufacturer of toy animals that I didn’t recognise.

This year I bought Irma a Northern Beauty advent calendar from Lumene that has cosmetics, lotions or makeup in every daily box. I chose this from a range of cosmetics manufacturers whose advent calendars range from 50€ to 280€.

However, this year Greggs, the British bakers famous for their sausage rolls and cheese slices, introduced their own advent calendar. According to the online version of the Daily Mirror,

each door reveals a tear-off token that can be taken into Greggs’ shops and exchanged for a different treat every day from its Christmas and wider menu, including the Festive Bake, flavoured lattes, sweet mince pie and a sausage roll (of course). On Christmas Eve, a £5 gift card sits behind door 24.

The calendars cost £24.

However, this has provoked the wrath of religious fanatics of the eccentric kind, because Greggs advertised the calendar with this image:

According to The Guardian

The bakery chain Greggs has apologised for offending Christians with a nativity scene advert that replaces Jesus with a sausage roll.

The chief executive of the Freedom Association, a rightwing pressure group, claimed the advert was “sick” and that the retailer would “never dare” insult other religions.

The UK Evangelical Alliance strongly criticised the baker, saying it was a gimmick that seemed to be about “manufacturing a scandal to sell baked goods”.

The problem with this line of argument lies with the fact that no other religion I know celebrates the run up to its main event with a twenty four day orgy of chocolate eating, toy making, perfume spraying, and increasing alcohol consumption before dealing with the actual event by over-eating, over-drinking, and the ceremonial viewing of several movies that people have seen so often that they can chant along with the dialogue.

If another religion did this then, unlike the chief executive of the Freedom Association, I confidently expect that we could all agree to dare to insult them by sneaking foodstuffs into their iconography.