Twenty-five Christmases ago I swore a great oath, shaking my fists at the heavens. No child of mine, I cried, would ever have a chocolate Advent calendar.

I kept to it. Even when I am a mad old granny I shall do so. I disown any child who can't be excited by merely opening a tiny paper window to peep at a new picture and know that Christmas Day is closer. As for the little horrors who - according to every jaunty parenting website - have already eaten the lot, words fail me. Put the brats on gruel, board them out in Romania for a month: save their atrophied, dull-witted, unwondering little souls!

These perverted items have been around in the US since 1958 and in Britain from a decade later; but even 25 years ago they were not as universal as they are today: the Archbishop of Canterbury himself has casually said that “the Advent calendar means daily sweets and chocolates”. Now we see a few still being faintly religious yet calorific, and innumerable others offering chocolate Simpsons, Barbies, Star Wars, footballers, anything. Charities do them enthusiastically, and there are posh Belgian-choc ones for emotionally retarded adults.

And they are all disgusting. Especially for small children, who are not yet corrupted into thinking that all wonder, all hope, all tradition and culture must be translated into cheap confectionery before it is worth having. Nothing against chocolate: it is the conflation with Advent that repels.

But we short-change our children in Britain anyway, when it comes to tradition. You need not be a believer to relish the shudder of Hallowe'en, the waiting of Advent, the carols of Christmas, the carnival and pancakes before Lent, the gaiety of Easter. Any family can enjoy small milestones such as Stir-up Sunday when the Christmas pudding is made (you've just missed it) or Twelfth Night when the Three Kings finally reach the stable after a perilous mantelpiece journey and the greenery is thrown out. When our children were young we actively sought out days to mark - Pudding Thursday was good - and my late mother insisted that her gravestone say: “She Kept the Feasts”.

Children not yet dulled into piggy insensibility appreciate the rolling year, the pattern of time and thrill of expectation. Not just lumps of chocolate themed on Arsenal FC or Tinky bloody Winky. Other cultures grasp that, and European children do better at games and observances: France has Epiphany parties with paper crowns, and in Engadine village, in Switzerland, children crack whips and ring cowbells to drive winter out of the valley. If all ours can do about Advent is to rip open chocolates, they're a lost generation.

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