24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being originally started in 2017 and has been produced every December ever since. I original started this whole endeavor because I wanted to do something around the holidays that wasn’t focused solely on consumption, and I was inspired by the Advent calendar that my parents did for me growing up. It was a beautiful handwoven one made by my mother. She had made a pocket for each day, so that you could slip in a small piece of paper. My parents would write a new prompt every day and slip it in the night before. When I woke up in the morning the first thing I would do would be to go straight to the calendar and see what was written on the day’s note. It was the source of a lot of magic for me in my younger years.

The goal is always to create a little magic every day during the month of December, so that’s it’s not just a countdown but an everyday celebration. It’s a focus on slowing down, finding balance and contentedness.

While it originally started as an antidote to the consumer frenzy that this season is often known for, every year I write it, it feels even deeper and more poignant than that. These last few years were largely defined by a global pandemic, and as we move forward with our lives, the ongoing impact of that experience (and many others) is still with us. In the midst of this, we need reminders of joy, reminders of light, reminders of gratitude. We need a little extra magic.

In the northern hemisphere we are moving towards winter, and this calendar pulls a lot of inspiration from seasonal rhythms. It’s the time of winter solstice, a time of finding light in the darkness, a time of moving at a different pace.

The Advent calendar goes out to paid subscribers of my Substack newsletter. You can sign up here.

There is also an evergreen print edition of the calendar, meant to be re-used year after year.