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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9826699" data-attributes="member: 907">Like many countries, Sweden has a tradition of advent calendars where you open a little flap on the calendar for every day in December until Christmas (which is celebrated on the 24th here – the religious part is still on the 25th for those who care about that, but the family stuff is on the 24th). I don't know if other countries have the tradition of children's TV or radio shows with accompanying calendars, but here it's a thing, and I'm pretty sure it was a bigger thing when I was a kid and most people only had access to the two public service tv channels.Anyway, in 1981 the TV advent calendar was "Stjärnhuset", or "The Star House". It was a bit unorthodox in two ways. One was that it wasn't all that Christmasy. The other was that instead of having a traditional calendar with flaps, you had a sheet of stickers and a starry sky to put them on. Each episode would talk about both some astronomical stuff and also about a Greek myth tied to one of the constellations, with the myth part being illustrated with still images, and the stickers had images of whatever the constellation was supposed to be. So the end result would look like this:[ATTACH=full]425888[/ATTACH](By Elisabeth Nyman, Gotlands museum - <a href="https://digitaltmuseum.se/0210213434530/adventskalender-julkalender" target="_blank">Adventskalender julkalender</a>, CC BY 4.0, <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=141255964" target="_blank">File:Stjärnhuset papperskalender.jpg - Wikimedia Commons</a>)There was also a framing device of an old lady teaching a younger but adult man about these things – I think they were supposed to be related but I'm not sure. The framing story had some Christmas stuff but not very much.So, when 5 year old Staffan saw this, this immediately ignited two interests in him: Greek Mythology, and Astronomy. And that's probably what lead to my interest in fantasy as well.</blockquote>

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