Advent spirit – inside and outside the computer

There's a lot of Advent spirit online, including art . For example, the website onlinekunst.de offers fascinating Advent art in several forms:

The musical cyberart advent calendar offers computer art by the artist Inga Schnekenburger, a completely new type of Christmas star, composed of blossoms and plants.

The Angel Advent Calendar provides you with what we all actually need daily, and sometimes quite urgently: angels whose “earthly calling” is to stand by people as guardian angels.

The angel on the entrance side is by Fra Angelico; further on you will find angels by Titian and Gentile de Fabriano , by Carlo Crivelli and Benozzo Gozzoli , by Hubert van Eyck and Rembrandt , by Giotto di Bondone and Filippino Lippi, by Domenico Beccafumi and Melchior Broederlam, by Ssemyon Fedorovich Ushakov and Pietro Perugino, by William Blake , Friedrich Herlin and Hugo van der Goes.

Also largely venerable angels from the 13th to 17th centuries, who certainly offer a great deal of experience as protection, but also a few young, fresh angels for all those who will need a little more effort in the coming year.

If you have Flash installed on your computer, the angels will begin to float; if not, you can see them in full on the next page. There you will find a text about the day and the angel.

The whole site is made with a lot of love and offers something to discover every day – a text or a poem about the angel picture, sometimes there are one or more large views of an angel picture as a printable PDF, sometimes the picture is available as a free screen background for Christmas, sometimes there are redirects, e.g. to heaven on Christmas Eve, for example.

With the 24 angels you can find at onlinekunst.de/engel , you will be excellently equipped until Christmas and can immediately test whether the Christmas celebration with the support of a guardian angel will exceptionally be completely harmonious.

Kunstplaza will send you a small Christmas gift : a short text accompanying each angel image, which you can copy, print (in your preferred decorative font), and then cut out. If you print out the angel for each day (perhaps in light gray at home, which you can then colorize, or perhaps in color at a copy shop for a high-quality print) and arrange the angel and text on a calendar template, you'll have guardian angels by your side for the entire year of 2015 and get to know one of our most important artists of the past each month. Reading the texts accompanying the images several times each month will surely help you remember some of the information.

Every day there's a fun little game, perhaps one that trains your sense of words or numbers, perhaps just something relaxing, and not necessarily always Christmassy, ​​on santagames.net .

At www.bustedhalo.com you'll find a clever Advent saying for the day , quotes from very different personalities from this world, or perhaps not so much from this world, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Princess Leia to Winnie-the-Pooh, all in English… A real joke about this calendar is the “Advent Buffering – Come back when this day has actually arrived. – Don't forget, Advent is all about waiting.”

The English Shape Design Studio came up with “It’s a Shape Christmas” , which means “It’s a Christmas shape”. And that’s exactly what it is: a digital advent calendar with Christmas graphics.

25 illustrators from around the world have contributed a Christmas graphic in their own personal style, which you can download for iPhone, iPhone 5, iPad, iPad Mini (and of course, simply as a JPG to your computer). Every day, a unique design is available at itsashapechristmas.co.uk , optionally combined with a small donation to the “Street Mission ,” but also free of charge.

An advent calendar for all those who love beautiful women in beautiful lingerie, with beautiful make-up, perhaps also beautiful shoes and beautiful clothes, can be seen with a short video for each day of Advent at thelovemagazine.co.uk/advent.

There's also "the opposite," at www.advent-online.de , where you can experience the entire Advent season online from your computer. On this joint platform of the Protestant and Catholic churches (when will there be a joint platform for all religions?), you'll find reflections on Advent for everyone seeking a genuine, contemplative Advent and Christmas atmosphere. There are plenty of reflections; the archive contains posts dating back to 2005, a total of 10 years x 24 days = 240 Advent reflections .

More quirky and garish than contemplative, things are at christmasgifs.org, a website conceived and implemented by London artist and designer Ryan Todd and the creative digital studio Enjoythis.

They've collected animated GIFs from illustrators and artists—Christmas GIFs, of course. There are some amazing things to discover on this page. Best of all, you can send all the GIFs as Christmas greetings directly from christmasgifs.org .

If you don't have time to soak up the Advent atmosphere outdoors during the entire Advent season, you can at least bring that Advent atmosphere to your screen as a substitute:

Cameraman Sven Schapeler wonderfully captured the Advent atmosphere in Berlin, from the Christmas lights at the Brandenburg Gate and Unter den Linden to Friedrichstrasse, Potsdamer Platz and Kudamm, accompanied by enchanting music, creating a true “Christmas Magic Berlin”.

If you ever get tired of the contemplative atmosphere or regret having only visited politically correct alternative Christmas markets this year – in other words, if you simply miss the really colorful, loud, garish, flashy, commercial Christmas market, you can find it on YouTube.

You can mentally transport yourself to Las Vegas, even if it's just pictures of the Berlin Christmas market at Alexanderplatz .