2012 Virtual Advent Tour: Day 24

And so we come to the end of this year's tour! It was another good one. I hope you have time for one last visit of our tour hosts for today.

Kailana @ The Written World
Carl @ Stainless Steel Droppings
Lauren @ The Australian Bookshelf
Cynthia White @ The Things You Can Read


I thought as we close the calendar for this year I would share one of my favourite Christmas shorts. It is a retelling of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas' and is available on YouTube. Enjoy!


Kelly and Marg would like to thank everyone who has participated in the tour this year - whether it is the first time you have participated or the seventh! We really appreciate the effort that everyone goes to to share their memories, traditions, food and drink, movies and songs...and so much more!

We hope that you will be back to participate in next year's tour.

In the mean time, if you have any suggestions or comments about the tour, please feel free to contact either of us individually or through the Virtual Advent tour twitter account or email.

Merry Christmas to you all!

2012 Virtual Advent Tour: Day 23

Only a couple of days left of the tour and, of course, the big day! Are you ready? I think I am. Maybe.

While I think about what I might not have done yet, how about we visit the following hosts on the tour:

Emma @ Girl Loves Books
*Carol @ Better is Possible
*Kaetrin @ Kaetrin's Musings


There are a few things I do every year. One of those is to watch Muppet Christmas Carol. I have to watch it at least once during the month of December. And, actually, I have done that since it came out in 1992. A 20 year tradition definitely is a tradition, huh?

What are some of your Christmas traditions that you feel lost if you don't do?

2012 Virtual Advent Tour: Day 22

I am on the road today, but I am hoping that you all get to visit our hosts today who are:

*Hannah @ Word Lily
*Deb Nance @ Readerbuzz
Heather @ Capricious Reader

If, like me, you are travelling these holidays, I hope everyone stays safe.

Today's quote comes from pages 140-141 of A Brief History of Montmaray by Michelle Cooper. The book is told in a diary format so this quote is an extract from a diary entry.

What else? Oh, Christmas. Well, Aunt Charlotte must have insisted Toby spend it with her. So much for Veronica's Christmas pudding wish - or mine, come to that. I'm pretty sure Simon spent Christmas at Aunt Charlotte's, too. As for us, we tried to put on a cheerful front for Henry's sake, but she was too miserable to appreciate it. To be honest, even I felt my festive spirits evaporate when I went to look for the box of decorations and found they'd been stored directly under a leaky part of the nursery ceiling. Toby's cardboard angels, my tissue-paper snowflakes, a dozen years worth of paper chains - all reduced to a sodden gray pulp. Even the gold-painted pine-cones seemed to have sprouted mould. And it was raining too hard to contemplate gathering any flowers or greenery outside, not that there's much about at this time of year anyway.

In the end, I followed the example of an arty governess we had a few years ago and set up a tall twisted bit of driftwood in the kitchen, with shells strung from the branches on pieces of leftover knitting wool. Henry contributed an angel she'd carved from a cuttlefish shell. And Veronica and Rebecca managed to cook Christmas dinner together without any major catastrophes. We had roast chicken stuffed with herbs, glazed ham and all the vegetables Henry could salvage from the waterlogged garden. The pudding was... well, it had a very interesting texture. Henry dropped her slice on the floor and it bounced. I think we boiled it too long. But Julia and the rest of the Stanley-Rosses had very kindly sent us a hamper stuffed full of mince pies and nuts and preserved fruit, so we had that instead. Afterwards Rebecca made egg-nog and I read A Christmas Carol aloud by the stove, while Veronica fixed the leaky tap over the sink and Henry mended a rip in her best fishing set. Uncle John stayed in his room throughout, of course, but the door was ajar, so it was almost as though he was there, too. So it wasn't such a terrible Christmas, after all.

2012 Virtual Advent Tour: Day 21

With today's posts we complete three weeks of the tour. Kelly and I really hope that you are enjoying it! I am sure that we will also enjoy today's stops:


Sassymonkey @ Sassymonkey Reads
*Julie @ Anglers Rest
*Julia @ A Piece of My Mind
*John Mutford @ The Book Mine Set



As with yesterday's quote, this one is from A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead.

Towards Christmas, one of the transports brought a piano to Ravensbruck. Watching it being unloaded, a young Russian girl exclaimed, 'My God! If only I could be allowed to play?' The chief sorter that day, a German girl called Sophie, asked the SS guard in charge. He found the idea of a young Russian Jew able to play the piano absurd. But the piano was moved on to flat ground and the girl sat down. She was an accomplished pianist. All over the camp, as far as the notes reached, the women prisoners stopped what they were doing to listen.

This was the second Christmas the group of French women had spent in a German camp. Once again, they gave each other little presents that they had made, stolen or saved up. The news of the war, transmitted by the women working int he SS offices and translated into a dozen languages, was getting better all the time, and there were real hopes that it might be their last Christmas in captivity. A Christmas tree was brought from the forest and the women stole little bits of wire and thread and material from the factories with which to decorate it.

2012 Virtual Advent Tour: Day 20

Are you on the countdown yet? We are. My house doesn't feel particularly festive because we haven't decorated as we are going to be away, but we have spent some time in the city trying to get into the spirit.

I am sure our tour stops today are feeling very festive!


Lu @ Regular Ruminations
*Alexandra @ The Sleepless Reader
*John @ The Book Mine Set

Both today's and tomorrow's quotes come from Caroline Moorehead's A Train in Winter, a non fiction book about female French Resistance workers who are captured by the Germans and spend time in some of the most infamous prison camps during WWII. Whilst they are kind of bleak I think they also demonstrate the strength of the human spirit in difficult circumstances.

Today's quote comes from page 239

On Christmas Eve, the women were permitted to stop work at four. Plans had been made for a dinner of celebration: women still alive despite all the odds celebrating the simple fact that they were not dead. They realised with delight that their hair had grown back a bit and they helped each other to wash it and brush the new tufts and strands that covered their heads. A few of the women had acquired stockings from 'Canada', and shirts had been 'organised' and cut up to make a clean white collar for each of them. With sheets as tablecloths, the refectory tables were formed into a horseshoe and decorated. Paper was crinkled into flowers, and the chemists had fashioned rouge and lipstick out of powders in the laboratory. Food, saved from the parcels from France and vegetables pilfered from the gardens were made into a feast of beans and cabbage, potatoes with onion sauce and poppy seeds. The women ate little, having lost the habit of food, but the sight of so much to eat made them cheerful. They drank sweet dark beer, stolen from the SS kitchens. After they had eaten, they turned out the lights, lit candles, and the Polish women sang hymns and ballads, saying to each other Do domou: back home. presents were exchanged: a bar of soap, a rope woven into a belt, a teddy bear found near the gas chambers and exchanged for two onions.

2012 Virtual Advent Tour: Day 19

Apologies to our hosts today for not getting their links up on time. I hope that people can still take the time to visit:

Meryl @ My Bit of Earth
Jinger @ The Intrepid Angeleno
*Vicki @ I'd Rather Be Reading at the Beach

2012 Virtual Advent Tour: Day 18

I don't want to be the bearer of panic inducing bad news but .... there are only 7 days to go until the big day. Let us provide you with a way to procrastinate just for a while by suggesting you visit the following stops on this year's tour.


*Leslie @ Under My Apple Tree
*Trish @ Love, Laughter, and a Touch of Insanity
*Julie @ Anglers Rest

I am just about to head interstate and might even manage to find myself spending some time in the small town of Clare, which is where Lola's Secret by Monica McInerney is set. Here are the opening paragraphs of that book:

Even after more than sixty years of living in Australia, eighty-four-year-old Lola Quinlan couldn't get used to a hot Christmas. Back home in Ireland, December has mean short days, darkness by four p.m., open fires and frosty walks. Snow if they were lucky. Her mother had loved following Christmas traditions, many of them passed down by her own mother. The tree decorated a week before Christmas Day and not a day earlier. Carols in the chilly church before Midnight Mass. Lola's favourite tradition of all had been the placing of a lit candle in each window of the house on Christmas Eve. It was a symbolic welcome to Mary and Joseph, but also a message to any passing stranger that they would be made welcome too. As a child, she'd begged to be the one to light the candles, carefully tying back the curtains to avoid the chance of fire. Afterwards, she'd stood outside with her parents, their breath three frosty clouds, gazing up at their two-storey house transformed into something almost magical.

She was a long way from Ireland and dark frosty Decembers now. Sixteen thousand kilometres and about thirty-five degrees Celsius to be exact. The temperature in the Clare Vally of South Australia was already heading towards forty degrees and it wasn't even ten a.m. yet. The hills that were visible through the window were burnt golden by the sun, not a blade of green grass to be seen. There was no sound of carols or tinkling sleigh bells. The loudest noise was coming from the airconditioner behind her. If she did take a notion to start lighting candles and placing them in all the windows, there was every chance the fire brigade would come roaring up the hill, sirens blaring and water hoses at the ready. At last count, the Valley View Motel that Lola called home had more than sixty windows. Imagine that, Lola mused. Sixty candles ablaze at once. It would be quite a sight. Almost worth the trouble it would cause ...