Christmas chocolate

The advent calendar is a daily ritual object and the chocolate in it is almost always thin, low-cost and moulded flat, because the format demands twenty-four identical small pieces at a price.

The selection box or tin is a household item placed out to be shared, which makes it a genuinely different product from a gift assortment despite looking similar.

The hollow figure is the same manufacturing problem as an Easter egg. Chocolate coins descend from a Northern European Saint Nicholas tradition on 6 December. And the boxed assortment is the personal gift format.

Buying the wrong one of these is the most common Christmas chocolate mistake — a personal gift assortment put out for a household disappears in an hour.

Almost all mass-market calendar chocolate is a low-cocoa moulded shape, frequently made with vegetable fat, and it is produced very far in advance. The premium calendar category is a recent development and the difference is real, because it changes the constraint from price-per-piece to quality-per-piece.

If the chocolate matters more than the ritual, a premium calendar or a plain bar and a paper calendar are both better answers than a mid-range chocolate one.

Seasonal stock sits in shops for weeks in heated buildings, which is the worst storage chocolate encounters in a normal year. Bloom, softening and a dull surface are all common by late December.

Buy late for perishable centres and early for moulded items if you want the best of the production run. Store at a stable cool room temperature rather than in a fridge, and keep it away from anything strongly scented — chocolate takes up odours readily.