2013 Virtual Advent Tour

Sorry for the delay, but here are the buttons for the 2013 Virtual Advent. Like last year there is a button you can use if you have participated for more than 5 years. Thanks very much to Heather from Capricious Reader for making them!

Announcing the 2013 Virtual Advent Tour

Kailana from The Written World and Marg from Adventures of an Intrepid Reader are very pleased and excited to announce that we will once again be running the Virtual Advent tour this year. This is the eighth year that we have hosted and we hope that the event has become an integral part of the book blogging community's holiday traditions.

The Virtual Advent tour first started when we pondered why should the kids get all the fun of opening a box on the advent calendar and finding a treat in there, and how could we have some blogging fun with a similar concept? So the Virtual Advent tour was born.

Each day anyone who wants to participate takes turns sharing a treat with our friends here in blogland. For example it could be something about your family traditions, recipes, your country's holiday traditions, or a favourite Christmas memory, movie, book, song...anything you like. Even if you don't celebrate Christmas we would like to hear about what your family does during the holiday season, whether it be celebrating Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or whatever it is that you do during this time.

If you are interested in signing up, then please sign up using the Google form (link below). If you want a specific date, then please include that along with your name and other details. If you don't need a specific date, then we will allocate a date to you. We will create a list of links so that as people express interest we will add them to the list, and then each day during the tour we will post a link directing visitors to the appropriate blog.

The tour will start on Sunday 1 December and run through until Tuesday December 24. If there are more people than there are days that's fine too.....the more the merrier! It just means that there will be more than one blog to visit on those days.

We would also like to take this opportunity to thank Alex for our gorgeous blog design!

And don't worry, we haven't forgotten the buttons for you to adorn your posts. They will be here shortly, so watch this space!

We look forward to visiting everyone on the tour.

Monday, December 24, 2012

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!

Sunday, December 23, 2012

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?

Saturday, December 22, 2012

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.

Friday, December 21, 2012

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.

Sunday, November 24, 2013

Tour Schedule for Virtual Advent 2013

Saturday, November 23, 2013

Virtual Advent 2013 Buttons