24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being Digital Advent Calendar: 2025 Edition

Sign up for the digital Advent calendar crafted to help you slow down and align with the winter season. Starts December 1st.

24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being Digital Advent Calendar kicks off on December 1st. Sign up now.

A subscription makes a great gift for a friend too.

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Hello friends,

It’s that time again…

The 9th annual edition of my digital Advent calendar “24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being” starts on December 1st.

When I did my first edition, almost a decade ago, I wanted an antidote to the consumer frenzy that had come to define the holiday season. As the Advent calendar as grown and evolved, it has come to be much more than that. An invitation to slow down, an invitation to pay attention, and invitation to cultivate light.

It’s not political in nature, but every year that I have written the calendar, the political and social undertones of our modern experience always impact what I end up writing. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Albert Camus’ book Create Dangerously, that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. “Artists faced by their times can neither turn away from nor become lost in them,” he wrote. No matter what we create, we are products of the times we live in.

Writing the calendar in 2020, I was four years into my annual experiment. The darkness of that pandemic winter influenced what showed up on the page. The calendar was no longer just an antidote to a frenetic consumer season—it was an attempt at finding bits of light in the darkness.

That has continued to be the goal, and it makes sense to me to use the winter season to help us do that. After all, this is a time that nature goes a little quieter. In the dark hours, the natural world takes its pause. Humans have long created rituals to survive that darkness, navigate our way through.

The idea behind the calendar is simple: a daily newsletter that runs December 1st through 24th, crafted to help you slow down and align with the winter season. A little light, warmth, and grounding straight to your inbox.

Around this time every single year when I go to announce the upcoming edition, I think to myself something along the lines of: “we need it this year more than ever.” I am definitely feeling that this year, and maybe you are too.

The Advent calendar is an offering for all paid subscribers of Creative Fuel.

I keep most of this newsletter free and accessible to everyone. This is important to me, particularly in times where money is tight for a lot of people. But, as always, creative labor is labor, and paid subscriptions ensures that this work is not only possible but also sustainable.

The Advent calendar also serves as a seasonal way to say THANK YOU to all of you who help to make this newsletter happen.

If you’ve been a longtime reader of Creative Fuel then I hope that this might be the moment where you say, “yes, I do want to support!”

For anyone who is new to the calendar, you’ll find additional details below.

I’m looking forward to this year’s edition, and I am hoping that many of you will join us.

-Anna

If you have taken part in the Advent calendar before and enjoyed it, I would love it if you shared this post with a friend or two.

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WHAT IS 24 DAYS OF MAKING, DOING, AND BEING?

The calendar is daily invitation to slow down, create a little beauty and magic, embrace the dark days, and find the light when we can.

It’s a season where we see capitalism on overdrive, and it’s also a season that can be incredibly difficult for a lot of people. Any kind of stress, loss, sadness is compounded. The darkness of the winter can exacerbate how we’re feeling about things in our personal sphere, and our global one.

In the midst of all this, we need reminders of joy, reminders of light, reminders of gratitude, reminders to be in whatever moment we’re in. We need a little extra magic.

Consider this digital Advent calendar a kind of seasonal creative retreat. It is crafted to help you slow down and align with the winter season

A little breath of fresh air in your inbox every day.

A call-to-action to create a little joy.

A small pocket of space in a time that so easily gets filled up.

A SEASONAL OFFERING

While it’s based off of Northern European/Western festive traditions, 24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being is a secular calendar, largely centered around the winter season, taking cues from the natural world and its rhythms.

This time of year has a tendency to make us feel like we should do more. This isn’t a calendar solely of projects, it is largely about taking the time and intention to be—both with our creative selves but with each other.

HOW IT WORKS

Every day from December 1st-24th, I send out a newsletter.

These daily newsletters are short, offering up some kind of prompt, quote, story, or rumination. There are a few tried and true classics that repeat every year. For those of you who have received the calendar before, those ones are kind of like seeing an old friend again after a long time away.  

OK, SIGN ME UP! CAN I SIGN A FRIEND UP TOO?

The Advent calendar goes out to paid subscribers. Yes you can gift someone a subscription!

You can sign up later this month, and I’ll send a reminder out a little closer to December 1st. But if you want to support this newsletter right this very second, you can sign up now.

This is a tight year for many. If you are experiencing any kind of economic hardship and want to receive the calendar, send an email to hello@creativefuelcollective.com and I’ll sign you up no questions asked. If you want to help support this offering, you can also donate a subscription.

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THE ADVENT CALENDAR CARD DECK

I also sell an Advent calendar deck. I made this back in 2020 and it is now in its fourth printing. The digital and print edition are different, but you can consider the print one as kind of a companion piece to the digital. Plus it’s evergreen, so you can use it year after year.

If you want to be sure you have yours before December 1st, I recommend getting your orders in soon. They make great gifts too!