Welcome to signups for this year’s Virtual Advent Tour. 2019 marks my fifth year as host of this annual event.

If this is your first time here at the winter holidays, welcome! As you probably know, a traditional Advent calendar is a season-marking device on which each day in December leading up to Christmas Day you open a door to unveil a hidden scene or piece of chocolate or some other delight. The Virtual Advent Tour is a bloggers’ take on that. In our version, each morning I’ll point you to a post at someone’s blog in which they share something about their holiday season.

Would you be willing to share a winter holiday post one or two days next month? You’d know the date(s) ahead of time (and can request a specific one if you’d like), your post can be as simple or as complex and in whatever format suits you, and there’s no need to tell me what you’re going to write about in advance. Folks have shared favorite holiday music, charities, recipes, religious calendar dates, literature, local events, memories, and traditions both old and new, to name some of the topics from years past.

If it sounds fun and you’d like to participate, please leave me a comment on this post telling me what date(s) you’d like. I’ll update this post as people claim days.

Oh, and a couple final housekeeping notes:

1. While both the tradition of the Advent calendar and the timing skew Christian, the tour is inclusive and open to anyone who celebrates December holidays of any sort — from Hanukkah to Kwanzaa, from Festivus to Solstice, and from Christmas to a new-to-me holiday I’m excited to hear about — and wants to share them with us. We love reading about all kinds of holiday celebrations and the traditions you’ve developed around them!
2. I have links to the 2019 Virtual Advent Tour badges in 400px and 200px that you’re welcome to download and use on your blog. If you want another size, let me know.
3. I’m trying to keep things simple this year. I tend to write my posts shortly after midnight my time (Eastern U.S.) and will schedule them to go live at 6 a.m. It would be awesome if your post were live when I’m writing because then I can give a little preview and link directly to it. However, if it’s not, I will assume you’ll get it live at some point, and will just embed a song and will link to your blog’s homepage.
4. As a participant, you may find you’ll get more responses to your post if you allow open comments (comments that don’t require someone to sign in to Google or Disqus, for instance) on your blog for that day. Obviously that choice is entirely up to you, but I have noticed that trend in past years.
5. If you use social media, I’ve used the hashtag #VirtualAdventTour on Twitter without complication for the past couple years.

Thanks in advance for making this one of my fun December traditions!

1: kathy b
2: Bridget
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6: raidergirl3
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9: Jo Kay
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12: Rudi
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15: Constance
16: Jo Kay
17: kathy b
18: raidergirl3
19: Rudi
20: kathy b
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24: Alissa