Hello Kitty and the Care Bears join forces for the grown-up Advent calendar

The chocolate Advent calendar has been losing ground for years. First came gin, then beauty products, then increasingly unlikely things behind 24 cardboard doors. This year’s latest entrant brings together two brands that have no business being so popular with adults, and are anyway.

Craft Buddy, the British crafts company behind the Crystal Art kits, will release a limited-edition Hello Kitty and Friends x Care Bears Advent calendar on 22 October. Behind each door is a magnetic character design that you decorate by pressing on small crystals, a kind of painting by numbers that sparkles. The finished pieces go onto a 35cm x 48cm framed magnetic board. By Christmas Eve that board is a complete rainbow scene of both sets of characters, which you can rearrange or move to the fridge afterwards.

The company is open about who it is aimed at. Both brands, it says, have outgrown their original audiences and now sell across fashion, beauty and homeware. Those buyers are nostalgic adults as much as children. The industry has a word for them, “kidults”, and it is not a flattering one.

Still, there is a reasonable argument for it. It is screen-free, it lasts beyond December, and anyone who has done one of these kits will know that placing crystals one at a time is oddly calming. Gary Wadhwani, Craft Buddy’s co-founder, called it “a keepsake that can be enjoyed long after December”. That is more than can be said for a calendar of chocolates.

It costs £34.99. Craft Buddy is also bringing back its Disney Crystal Art Advent calendar at the same price, with Mickey Mouse, Stitch, Elsa and Buzz Lightyear building into a framed Christmas tree. For more traditional households, a £24.99 Christmas Friends version has Santas, snowmen, candy canes and bells, all double-sided, to hang on the tree.

The chocolate version is not quite dead. But it no longer has December to itself.