The Advent Calendar:

Okay, not everyone here might be familiar with the idea of an Advent Calendar, so i guess i'll explain how it works:
Over here in Austria and Germany it is a tradition that from the start of December till christmas day you have a calendar
that is usually a big picture with 24 little doors hidden in it somewhere, numbered accordingly from 1 to 24, and
every morning you get to open up the new window and there is some other cute little picture behind it.

I decided to do something similiar, no big background picture cause i cannot HTML good enough for that but.. each day you
get a new little picture behind the according number. Of course the ones of previous days will still be here too, but no peeking
ahead of time allowed.

Oh, and a few of them might look a bit strange, because they pertain to Austrian customs, so i added some annotations
for better understanding of those just beneath the calendar.
Have fun and merry christmas, hannukah, Yule or what you decide to celebrate!

1st, 8th, 15th and 22nd: during Advent it is tradition to have a wreath made from evergreen boughs on the livingroomtable, with 4
candles, symbolizing the 4 sundays before christmas. Every sunday one more of those candles is lit, and families are supposed to
sit around the table and tell christmas stories, sing christmas carols and eat christmas cookies

5th and 6th : In Austria the christmas presents are not brough by Santa Claus but by the christ child. Santa Claus still makes an appearance in the form of
Sankt Nikolaus, depicted rather closer like the original, the bishop of Myra ( today in Turkey, back then in the Byzantinean Empire) He is usually accompanied
by a scary figure that varies localy but is usually a sort of leftover from the Pagan days, often the Krampus, a modified version of the Horned Man, not a devil,
but a kind of rough, wild dude, with horns, hooves and such. While originally the Nikolaus brought small presents ( candy and fruit) to good children and the
Krampus came to punish the bad ones, by now the Krampus delivers the presents too, and comes a day earlier. No one spanks bad children anymore anyhow
I should hope :) ( well, duh i know they do, but they shouldn't :p )

22nd: (christmas rant start) Okay, one thing that pisses me off about christians, especially christian parents, is how they style the nativity to show how poor and meek jesus was right from the start. Josef was a carenter. That is a *trade, a respected position in the community back then! And likewise Jesus was not born in a manger because his parents were too poor to afford a room but because the inns were full! Read the bible properly! it says there in Luke 2 7: "And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him up in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn." So get over it already! The miracle is that god agreed to become mortal, not that he agreed to be piss poor. RAH! Why are christians and buddhist so obsessed with suffering as a way to redeem yourself? perpetual bad conscience? feh (christmas rant end)

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