Atley Jonas.com | Advent Calendar 2013 – A Project With St. John the Divine

A very unique gingerbread house on display in Victoria, B.C.

Several weeks ago, I was invited by Alastair McCollum, the new rector at St. John the Divine Anglican Church in Victoria, B.C., to take part in an Advent project. Many may already be quite familiar with the concept of Advent and Advent calendars, but in case it’s not a tradition you’re familiar with, here’s a quick primer.

In many traditional Christian denominations, the weeks leading up to Christmas Day (Dec. 25) are collectively known as Advent. This is meant to be a time of preparation and anticipation for the celebration of the birth of Jesus. As a part of this tradition, Advent calendars have become a way for people to mark the days leading up to Christmas, in an enjoyable way. In its simplest form, an Advent calendar would consist of a large card, with little doors or windows cut into it like flaps, and with the dawn of each day, a door would be opened. Behind each door, might be printed a short poem, story, prayer, and in fancier calendars, could even be a treat like a piece of chocolate, or a small toy.

In keeping with this tradition, St. John the Divine decided to create an online Advent calendar on the church’s webpage, where people could click onto a picture of a door for each day of Advent. The pictures of the doors would be gathered from all around the city of Victoria, and when clicked, would reveal a new page containing some text, a prayer, poem, song, or even Youtube video clips, and other surprises. In this version of the Advent calendar, some doors were meant to be fun and lighthearted, while others were to be thought-provoking and meditative, and even others yet, somewhat unsettling.

I thought I would share this project on my website, as I took part in the planning stages of this undertaking, but was also involved in writing some of the content, and taking some of the photos.

The main, welcome page can be found here: Advent Doors Victoria

The pages with my content included: Day 4, Day 5, Day 10, Day 13

Finally, here are some of the photos I took for this project. Note, only a couple of these were actually used in the final cut, but they all turned out rather nicely, so I thought I might include them here for everyone’s enjoyment.