More than just cookies

Get your Advent on

Clearly, I love Advent. I love preparing for Christmas and counting down the days. I love rituals and traditions. I love Advent calendars, from the simple paper calendars, through store-bought chocolate or Lego calenders, to the amazing calendars my German friends and family assemble for their children. German moms don't do stocking stuffers, they make Advent calendars instead. And, yes, German stores do sell items just for the calendar the way American stores sell stocking stuffers.

• Paper calendar from Design*Sponge. Simple, easy-to-find materials.
• Starting with a calendar on empty thread spools, send someone on a treasure hunt!
• Cute and clever: a calendar from gum packs.
• Recycle bin Advent calendar, or all you need is a glue gun, some markers and an overflowing recycle bin — and who doesn't have an overflowing recycle bin?

When the web was new, it was so joyful to see Christmas on the web. It has started as a way to easily exchange information, but then people had started adding fun things like web cams and enormous text files of recipes, and now there was Christmas! There were days until Christmas counters, web cams pointed at Christmas trees with web forms to control the lights, and, of course, Advent calendars:

• A new Flash game every day.
• Rooney Design
• Penelope Schenk
• Perl Advent calendar
• Christina Preuss's quotes of German philosophers

I was so thrilled to finally have 24 recipes on the site so that I could make my own Advent calendar, one of my first Perl projects. A few years ago I expanded it from simply recipes to stories about Christmas, or disasters of baking. This year's theme is confessions from my kitchen: all those times I don't do what I'm "supposed" to, or don't like the hot new food, or pooh-pooh the latest trend. Nothing too salacious or shocking, unless eating cake for breakfast will shock you.

A note about copyright on this site.

Recipes and pictures from this site have appeared in some interesting places over the years: web pages that directly linked to pictures (running up my bandwidth) without credit, websites and discussion boards that just copy the pages, and New Jersey newspapers that copied recipes (but at least mentioned the site). It was a bit annoying. Some clarification seems in order.

Don't claim anything on this site as your own, including copying recipes, essays, stories, pictures, etc. and republishing them, including web pages, books and newspapers.

Don't directly link to images. Don't copy the images and use them for yourself. That's claiming something on the site as your own.

If you want to use something on the site for professional purposes or to republish, say, in a newspaper, another web page or even on a discussion board, contact me first.