Whisky advent calendar
My (now ex) wife was fond of whisky. She was also a huge Christmas fan. December would always be a hectic month for her, and she'd benefit from a little whisky every evening to put some ease on the stress of Christmas preparations.
To make her December months a bit better I made her a whisky advent calendar. I bought small bottles from Glas och flaskor and some thin MDF board and went on with the project.
Building the wooden parts
It was quick to calculate a rough layout of the piece. I had a vision in my head and a few ideas and only needed to calculate the circumference and height on each platform. The calculation was made by putting the bottles on a piece of paper and produce markings to cut patterns of the paper.
In Sweden, where I live, we celebrate Christmas eve as the main Christmas day. Every advent calendar goes from 1:st of December to the 24:th of December. That would sum up to 24 bottles, but I added two extra bottles; one for the emergency compartment hidden in the back of the tower, and one for the name day of Eva (in the regular Swedish calendar each day is associated with a specific name, and one of my ex-wife's names was in this range of days).
At the top platform a room for a candle was spared for coziness.
The platforms were basically cut semi-circular although some of them had their centers taken out as well.
I wanted the inner of the tower to be hollow to accommodate a hidden compartment for hiding an extra small bottle of whisky for extra stressful days. A kind of distress relief. Since the height of the hidden compartment needed to be higher than the height between the platforms one of the platform pieces had the center taken out as well.
When the platforms were ready it was time to create the rounded distances between the platforms. I glued wooden pieces together to form solid blocks of wood, then marked where to make cuts, then cutting away the excess wood in the bandsaw.
The back of the whisky tower was cut from the same type of board, as was the star at the top.
All the pieces were glued together using regular wood glue.
Painting
I used what paint I had at home. Red felt Christmassy, and as my ex-wife preferred silver over gold (for decoration) I painted details in silver using a silver marking pen. I also added a cheesy quote saying:
Lisa i strävfull advent
This would roughly translate to:
Relief in laborious advent
Around the edges I put transparent glue and sprinkled silver colored glitter over it for a soft wintery touch.
Preparing the bottles
For labels I found adhesive labels in the supermarket. Each bottle was given a label with the number of the day. The two extra bottles were labeled Eva
and Nöd
(=Emergency
).
I'd bunkered up on different types of whiskeys over the year, saving the last part of many bottles just for variation in this calendar. Now, using a funnel, I poured whisky in the bottles according to a specific pattern:
| Important days (Christmas eve, 13:th of December (the very special Lucia day in Sweden) | Was given the best whiskeys |
| Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays | Was given good whiskeys |
| Wednesdays | Was given almost as good whiskeys as the weekends to create a break in the otherwise monotonous weekdays |
| Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays | Relatively cheap everyday whiskeys |
On the back of each bottle a tape with the texted name of the whisky was added.
End result
The end result was a happy wife. It took her to mid January to finish the bottles, so maybe they are a bit large, but the gift seem appreciated.
Still, many years after the divorce she brings the bottles to me each November for a refill.
