Welcome to Day 1 of the Virtual Advent Tour! I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving, if you celebrated it, and a great final week of November if you didn’t.

Today is the first day of December, and, as with any traditional paper Advent Calendar, it marks the first door of our 24-day calendar to be opened. What will we find behind each one? It will vary from destination to destination, so I urge you to visit each day to see what our bloggers have in store for you.

Today’s host is Nan from Letters from a Hill Farm, who has a fun post about a different type of virtual Advent calendar (and cards).

There is still time to sign up! We’d love for some more bloggers to participate. Wondering what’s involved? Go here. I think you’ll find we’re a supportive, enthusiastic bunch, so however casual or formal you want to go, we’ll be appreciative. Here’s the schedule as it currently exists:

1: Nan
2: Bridget
3: sprite
4: sprite
5: Nan
6: raidergirl3
7: Judith
8:
9: Rudi
10:
11: Kat
12:
13:
14: Judith
15:
16: Kat
17:
18: Jo Kay
19:
20: Constance
21: raidergirl3
22:
23: Rudi
24: Bridget

A few final notes:

• I promised a badge and have one now in 1200px and 400px. Let me know if you want a different size or need help downloading them.
• I am a night owl, so I’m writing these posts before I go to bed in the wee smalls and then scheduling them to go live between six and seven a.m. EST in the U.S. If posts are live at our destinations as I’m writing, I’ll share a direct link to that post and give you a teaser. If they aren’t, I’ll give you a link to the author’s blog and will try to update my post later in the day with more specifics. If there’s no Virtual Advent Tour post live when you stop by a site early (I know some of you are up way before the sun!), please check back later. It’ll be worth a return visit!
• If you are a day’s destination and like to receive feedback/have conversations with your visitors, please make it as easy as possible to comment on your post. We like to leave you notes, but don’t always have access if you have to log into some other site, like Facebook or Gmail, to comment. Obviously, though, that’s up to you, because I get how annoying spammers are.

That’s it! See you back here tomorrow!

As I learn about other free or low-cost Advent events around the web, I’ll let you know. If you hear of others, leave me a note in the comments and I’ll promote them.

• Courtney of Be More with Less is running her 31 Days of Gifts You So Deserve, an emailed Advent calendar of what looks to be quieter, low-cost suggestions for a balanced December.
• Two knitting patterns where the instructions are given in short, daily chunks: Christina Campbell’s Project Peace 2018, which is a cowl supplemented by peace-centered posts at The Healthy Knitter, and Tricia Weatherston’s Advent Scarf 2018, which is a scarf comprised of Japanese stitches. (It started the day after Thanksgiving, so there will need to be some catch-up if you want to give this to someone on Christmas Day.)