Virtual Advent Calendars!

09 Dec 2008 5 Comments

by madsilence in Art, cooking, Creativity, Culture, Digital art, Holidays, Recipes, Websites Tags: advent calendar, Art, Christmas, cooking, Humor

A yearly tradition for my family - the advent calendar!

Advent calendars are a tradition at my house.  You know, the ones made of thick paper with a colorful picture on the front and lots of tantalizing little doors!  One of my favorite times during cold Decembers was coming home from high school and opening the day’s door to find a tasty morsel of German chocolate inside.  Sadly in Japan advent calendars are few and far between, and my local import store sold them all in one week (lesson learned: always buy something when you see it, nobody here restocks!) so this year I’m depending on virtual advent calendars!

One of my favorites this year is Jamie Oliver’s version of the advent calendar.  If you’ve never heard of him, he’s the guy known as the Naked Chef, a wonderful fighter for real food in school cafeteria lunches and more cooking at home.  His calendar features cooking videos and recipes for the holidays!  If you like what you find, also check out his “Ministry of Food” video podcast.

Intute, a great arts and humanities resource, has their own version of the advent calendar which features “academic resources on the Internet on a variety of themes – artists’ lives, anniversaries, soldiers’ experiences during the First World War, international awards, film, dance, English literature and languages and literatures from around the world, as well as a few subjects which imply that “it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…””

The Tate in London has a cute advent calendar with a different artwork chosen by a 4th grade student every day from their Children’s Collection.  Today’s work is “Bull 1″ by Roy Lichenstein (I really love the kids comments on the artwork – it would be nice to recapture that simple appreciation of art ^^).

Electric December '08 - a smorgasboard of new directing talent.

Electric December ’08 is an advent calendar with a different movie from an up-and-coming film-maker each day.

And on a more religious note, I thought that this advent calendar, called “Following the Star,” was a beautiful piece of Flash work that really invites us to sit and reflect on the spiritual side of Christmas.

As I told my students when I explained Christmas to them, it doesn’t matter what you do to celebrate Christmas, whether it’s with a Advent Calendar, barbecuing on the beach in Australia, creating edible works of art in the kitchen, or going to church on Christmas morning, what’s most important is spreading  joy and love!

~MS the Younger

(Oh, and PS, don’t forget to check out this awesome Nintendo 8-bit music style Christmas album ~_^)

***************

To learn more about the  History of the Advent Calendar:
  
“This page from a German advent calendar company presents information on the origins of advent calendars and a short history of their evolution from simple chalk lines marking off the days in December until Christmas to paper calendars with windows.  The online Advent Calendar Museum provides photographs of calendars from the 1940s through 1960s. Also includes a brief history of the Sellmer Company in Stuttgart and an online tour of calendar production.”

Via the Librarian’s Internet Index (LII)

~MS the older & wiser