The Jotter of Rotter

It seems that the German tradition of counting down the 24 days of December to Christmas Eve has take hold not only in the supermarkets here in the U.S., but also on the web. While 10 years ago, I had family send over those often chocolate-filled, visually appealing calendars, they are now everywhere. Internet versions are often used as marketing tool for costumer retention. The German website http://www.adventskalender-gewinnspiele.de/ has a long list of online calendars where you can win prizes. There is even a site where all German Facebook Calendars are listed. Here are a number of other interesting examples:

First the German ones:

• Die Zeit, Germany’s leading intellectual weekly, is having a Knowledge [Wissen] calendar that reveals every day little known facts about nature.
• Speaking of Knowledge, the Max-Planck Institute has a calendar that presents every day “fascinating scientific images.”
• The Pal publishing house, specialized in literature for psychotherapy, offers a calendar with helpful advise.
• Back to the roots, the University of Marburg has visitors guessing fairy tales in its Brothers Grimm calendar.
• Museums seems to be especially fond of presenting their artifacts in calendar form. The State Museums of Berlin present daily a painting with corresponding sound collages on their Youtube Channel.
• The Theodrarium a high school in Paderborn, hides stories and recipes behind its online calendar doors, but don’t dare opening a door early. Then you get the message “bad children don’t get anything for Christmas.”
• The German Embassy in Washington has one, of course. It has culturally relevant images and videos that acquaint the U.S. audience with German Christmas culture.
• Promoting German language and culture, the Goethe-Institut calendar shows us German cartoons when opening one of their doors.
• The German broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW), whose mission is also the promotion of learning German, has an appropriate calendar that uses audio clips where DW colleagues explain Christmas-related terms but are prohibited from using the most obvious terms (like the game Taboo).

Moving on to English-language calendar, there seems to be a similar line-up:

• The Atlantic publishes pictures from the Hubble Telescope on its calendar.
• The Economist surprises its readers with “a collection of the 24 most popular maps, charts, data visualisations and interactive features…” I am sure there are fans out there.
• The Jesuit Loyola Press tries to remind its audience of the religious dimension of advent through stories pictures, and videos. It also has a children’s calendar.
• The BBC has a calendar that introduces visitors to the life and music of Johann Sebastian Bach. It also includes a quiz. – oops, it’s from 2005, but that’s the beauty of advent calendars, you can use them independently from the year. And it’s still wonderful.
• And there are museum calendars as well. See Pinterest for the one from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.