A Window a Night: Walking Dacorum's Living Advent Calendars This December

Every December something quietly brilliant happens in this corner of Hertfordshire. Somebody tapes a sheet of blackout card to their front window, cuts a shape out of it, and suddenly a street has a date attached to it. Do that twenty-four times across a town and you've got a living advent calendar — free, walkable, and considerably better for the calves than the chocolate version.

The idea has spread through Dacorum over the past few years, and 2026 looks like the busiest December yet. What follows is a practical wander through the main trails, plus the boring-but-useful bits about timing, parking and keeping small children out of people's flowerbeds.

What you're actually turning up for

A living advent calendar is exactly what it sounds like. Households, schools, churches, pubs and shops each take a number between 1 and 24. On their night, their window gets revealed — usually at 6pm or thereabouts — and stays lit for the rest of the month. Some organisers print a paper map; others run the whole thing through a Facebook group and a laminated sheet in the church porch.

Two things worth knowing before you set out. First, most trails reveal one window a night rather than all 24 at once, which means a single walk on 20 December won't show you the whole set unless you're lucky. Second, the maps are usually published in the last week of November, so check the organiser's page the weekend before you go rather than trusting last year's printout in the glovebox.

Berkhamsted: the tightest loop in the district

The Berkhamsted trail is the one to start with if you've never done this before, mostly because it barely needs a plan. The windows tend to cluster around the High Street, Castle Street and the lanes running down towards the canal, which means a genuine 40-minute circuit with a pub at roughly the three-quarter mark.

Start at the station end, work up towards the castle, then drop down to the water and come back along the towpath. The canal stretch is the atmospheric bit — lit windows, still water, the occasional narrowboat with a string of fairy lights — but it's also the muddy bit, so trainers rather than anything suede.

What makes Berkhamsted work is the mix. You'll get a florist doing something elaborate with dried oranges, a terraced house doing something charming with a single star, and at least one family who have clearly been planning since September. Some displays carry a small chalkboard explaining the story behind the window — a memorial, a joke, a nod to a local school — and those are worth stopping for.

Hemel Hempstead: two walks, not one

Hemel is too spread out for a single trail, so treat it as two evenings.

The Old Town is the obvious first. The high pavement, the churchyard, the streets behind the Old Town Hall — the windows here sit close together and the buildings do half the work for you. It's also the most sociable version, with people drifting between windows and someone usually handing out mince pies on the busiest nights.

Boxmoor and Apsley is the second. This one is looser — a few clusters around the village green, a stretch along the canal at Apsley — and rewards a slightly slower pace. It's quieter than the Old Town, which makes it the better pick for families with very small children or anyone who finds crowds a lot.

Both are pushchair-friendly if you stick to the pavements and avoid the towpath after heavy rain. Neither needs a car once you've parked.

Tring and the villages: pick two, not five

The temptation with the village trails is to string together six of them in one evening. Don't. Villages like Aldbury, Little Gaddesden, Potten End and Chipperfield each have their own small trails, often run by the church or the primary school, and each one is a fifteen-minute stroll rather than an hour. Chain three together with driving in between and you'll spend more time on the B-roads than looking at windows.

The better approach: choose Tring for the main evening — the High Street and the streets off it — and then pick one village for a weekend afternoon wander. Aldbury's pond makes an especially good backdrop, and the village trails tend to run earlier in the evening, which suits younger children.

Kings Langley is the sleeper pick. The canal-side stretch and the streets around the church are compact, and there's usually something worth eating within sight of the final window.

Timing it properly

A few things learned the hard way:

• Go a week behind the reveal. If windows 1 to 8 are up, walking 1 to 8 on a Tuesday evening in mid-December is calmer than joining the crowd on the night itself.
• Families with under-sevens: weekend afternoons between about 3.30pm and 5pm are the sweet spot. Windows are lit, pavements are quiet, and nobody has to be carried home in the dark.
• Evenings: 6pm to 8pm, but aim to finish by half eight, because a lot of these displays are in people's front rooms and nobody wants an audience at ten o'clock.
• Bring a torch, and something reflective for anyone small. Village lanes have no pavement in places, and December isn't the month for a dark-coloured coat.
• Car parks: check the machine rather than assuming. Evening charging varies from one Hemel car park to the next, and the apps aren't always right. Sticking to one town per trip solves most of this.

The unglamorous etiquette bit

Don't block driveways, don't lean on garden walls, and don't photograph into a living room if there's someone sitting in it. If the trail has a collecting tin or a QR code for a local charity, that's usually the point — a pound in the box is the cheapest entry fee you'll pay all month.

And if you're thinking about putting a window up yourself in 2027, the sign-up for most of these trails opens in October. Twenty-four windows always needs a few more than twenty-four volunteers, and the ones who sign up early get the numbers that fall on a Saturday.

Check your chosen trail's page before travelling — reveal times and maps do shift from year to year — then wrap up warm and get walking. It's the only advent calendar in Dacorum that comes with fresh air.