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Every year, Essay Daily publishes an Advent Calendar, which brings you a new essay each day during Advent. Some years these essays are themed; other years they are not. Want to pitch us something? Try Will or Ander at the right. We usually fill up our Advent Calendar spots ahead of time, so if you're interested, ping us early!
Oftentimes we will continue to publish essays in these categories throughout the year ahead, so if you missed 2025's Advent Calendar (essays on visual media), we'll keep running them into 2026, so if you want to pitch us on an idea, you're not too late.
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2025's Advent Calendar (Essays on Visual Media: TV shows, video games, movies, visual art, t-shirts, etc.):
- Dec 1: Jodie Noel Vinson, Sick and Tired: on The Golden Girls
- Dec 2: Lily Herman, Run the Train (on T2 Trainspotting)
- Dec 3: Michael Martone, ...All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt: 8 Memoirs on Wearing Words
- Dec 4: Wyatt Williams, Arnold
- Dec 5: Joni Tevis, Float and Trowel, Barrow and Lantern (Eight Craftsmen, ca. 1910)
- Dec 6: Brooke Wonders, Nightmare in the Blood
- Dec 7: Emiland Kray: Even Robots Feel Sad Sometimes
- Dec 8: Scott Dickensheets, In the City
- Dec 9: Cathy de la Cruz, A Mess, a Museum
- Dec 10: Julija Šukys, Weeds
- Dec 11: Leah Mensch on Melancholia
- Dec 12: Nicole Walker: Wives and Lives: from Polygamy to Polyamory
- Dec 13: Susan Briante: You Probably Don't Even Know What You Don't Know: on Loving Reservation Dogs
- Dec 14: Erin Keane, Dreamchild, or the Curse of Being Alice
- Dec 15: Isabelle Robinson, Three Scenes from an Essay about Scream
- Dec 16: Ted McLoof, The Year Seth Cohen Ruled the Earth
- Dec 17: Dave Griffith, The Godfather at 50
- Dec 18: Charles Jensen: My Enemy, Myself: the Weaponization of Player Agency in The Last of Us Part II
- Dec 19: Sharon Wahl, Alone
- Dec 20: Ander Monson, Decommissioning the Drone Priest: on Weirdness and NORCO
- Dec 21: Patrick Madden on Midnight Mass
- Dec 22: Kirk Wisland, The Brogue of Broken Men
- Dec 23: Alison Deming on Binge Watching
- Dec 24: Geramee Hensley, Digital Mind Wave (on Final Fantasy VII)
- Dec 25: Will Slattery on Pentiment
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2024's Advent Calendar:
- Nov 30: Julie Marie Wade, Advent
- Dec 1: Danielle Geller, On Timberborn
- Dec 2: Kathleen Rooney, Perfect Days in Imperfect Times
- Dec 3: Nicole Walker, No Authority, Just Thanks
- Dec 4: Kristine Langley Mahler, Joyful Girl
- Dec 5: Geramee Hensley, I Want to Live (a Timed, Unrevised Life)
- Dec 6: Maddie Norris, The Slap
- Dec 7: Leah Mensch, Hard Evidence Had Nothing to Do with My Life
- Dec 8: Cameron Carr, On Terminals and Turning Pages
- Dec 9: Emily Podwioski, Blanche's Inferno
- Dec 10: David Carlin, it's like you want to skip mourning and go straight to gratitude
- Dec 11: Alison Hawthorne Deming, Of Loneliness
- Dec 12: Susan Briante, No Where is Outside Mississippi
- Dec 13: Brooke Champagne, Wet or Dry, Hot or Cold: A Climatological Study of the Funny Compass™ (That Could Save America?)
- Dec 14: Athena C. Monson, The Cat Cuddle Spectrum
- Dec 15: Katherine Cusumano, Please Welcome Hardcore Santa to the Ring
- Dec 16: Jaric Sarmiento, On the Show that Saved My Life
- Dec 17: Matthew Morris, Cosmic Brownie, Zone Bar
- Dec 18: Steven Church, Signs of Something Else
- Dec 19: Jason Sepac, Becoming Nostalgia
- Dec 20: Noam Dorr, Tzupzik
- Dec 21: Patrick Madden, Enough
- Dec 22: Kyoko Mori, The Voice: on Cats and Politics
- Dec 23: Lydia Paar, Plurinity
- Dec 24: Yvette Saenz, On Going Home
- Dec 25: Will Slattery, Casement's Ghost
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2022's Advent Calendar (unthemed)
- Dec 1, Lucy Schiller, The Air and the Larynx: on Nicholson Baker
- Dec 2, Michael Wheaton on Lucas Mann
- Dec 3, Rajpreet Heir, Reading Censorship: An Essay Inspired by Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris
- Dec 4, Paul Crenshaw, The Last (covering Steve Edwards)
- Dec 5, Patrick Madden: f-Words: An Attempt at an Essay on Style (feat. Brian Doyle)
- Dec 6, Jamie Etheridge, Oysterless Bay (covering Blair Braverman)
- Dec 7, Amy Barnes, Bah, Numb Bug (covering Sabrina Orah Mark0
- Dec 8, Andrew Maynard on Rabih Alameddine
- Dec 9, Chelsea Biondolillo, Wrestling with Joni Mitchell's "River"
- Dec 10, Andrew Bertaina on Lia Purpura
- Dec 11, Ivy Taylor on the Tangible
- Dec 12, Dave Madden on Ending and Unending
- Dec 13, Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Museums of Natural History: Essay Collections as Curation
- Dec 14, Brooke Champagne on Vivian Gornick
- Dec 15, Megan Neary, An Hour of Splendor
- Dec 16: Sol Kim Cowell, The Final Girl
- Dec 17, Michael Martone, Ten and a Half Short Essays on the Short Essay
- Dec 18, Julie Lunde, 100 Essayistic
- Dec 19, Nicole Walker, TikTok Manifestations by Non-Boomer, Non-Gen Z specimens: A Gen-X approach.
- Dec 20, Lawrence Lenhart, Toward an Unregulated Confessionalism: Prolegomenon to The Calling Party
- Dec 21, Susan Briante, Our Midwinter Days
- Dec 22, Ander Monson on the Pleasures of a Book all about Road House
- Dec 23, Jenny Spinner, Um Aidan
- Dec 24, Dave Griffith, Station X: Christmas Eve, Strawtowne Pike, Bunker Hill, IN
2021's Advent Calendar was Cover Essays. We all know what a cover song is, but a cover essay is a rarer thing. So let's write and publish some. Writers will identify an essay they love or have always wondered how it worked, and write their own version of that essay. Writers should take the original essay's topic or stance or persona or formal conceit or structure or peculiar device or some other identifying aspect of the essay and use that to write their own essay. We'll publish one a day during Advent this year.
Want to write one? Drop us a line with your proposal.
(Related, check out the 2022 March Faxness Tournament, which will be focusing on cover songs.)
The 2021 Advent Calendar (cover essays):
- Dec 1, Heidi Czerwiec covering Lia Purpura, Jamaica Kincaid, Wallace Strevens, Tim O'Brien, Shakespeare, Brian Doyle, and John Scalzi
- Dec 2, Joe Bonomo covering Stuart Dybek's "Confession"
- Dec 3, Mieke de Vriese covering Naima Coster's "Subjunctive"
- Dec 4, Jodie Noel Vinson covering Gay Talese's "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold"
- Dec 5, Jamie Etheridge covering Joan Didion's "In Bed"
- Dec 6, Eric Aldrich covering Roland Barthes' "The Brain of Einstein"
- Dec 7, Justin St. Germain covering Walter Benjamin's "Hashish in Marseille"
- Dec 8, Scott Russell Morris covering Virginia Woolf's "Street Haunting"
- Dec 9, Brooke Champagne covering Anne Lamott's "Shitty First Drafts"
- Dec 10, Megan Baxter covering Ted Kooser's "Small Rooms in Time"
- Dec 11, Mo Daviau covering Jacqui Shine's "In the Trance Room"
- Dec 12, Sarah Minor covering Brian Doyle's "The Greatest Nature Essay Ever"
- Dec 13, Chris Daley covering Sei Shōnagon's "The Pillow Book"
- Dec 14, Marcia Aldrich covering Sarah Einstein's "Self-Portrait in Apologies"
- Dec 15, Darcy Jay Gagnon covering Lawrence Weschler’s "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder"
- Dec 16, Thomas Mira y Lopez covering José J. Veiga's "Professor Pulquério" & Alejandro Zambra's "Multiple Choice""
- Dec 17, Sara Campbell covering Joan Didion's "In Bed"
- Dec 18, Lawrence Lenhart covering DFW's "Consider the Lobster" and MK Fisher's "Love and Death Among the Molluscs"
- Dec 19, Scott Dickensheets covering David Gates's "Log Man"
- Dec 20, Marcia Aldrich covering Sei Shônagon’s The Pillow Book
- Dec 21, Patrick Madden covering Louise Imogen Guiney's "On a Pleasing Encounter with a Pickpocket"
- Dec 22, Ander Monson covering Matias Viegener's 2500 Random Things About Me Too
- Dec 23, Will Slattery covering Anne Carson's "Merry Christmas from Hegel"
- Dec 24, David Griffith covering Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five
- Dec 25, Jenny Spinner covering Woolf's "The Death of the Moth"
and 2021's calendar also included a Christmas Octave: - Dec 26, Spencer Wilkins covering Jericho Parms's "On Puddling"
- Dec 27, Hannah Bonner covering Ariana Reines
- Dec 28, Rebecca Flowers covering Woolf's "The Death of the Moth"
- Dec 29, Sarah Khatry covering Brandon Shimoda's "Domanju"
- Dec 30, Aaron Pang covering Roland Barthes's "Plastic"
- Dec 31, Logan Naylor covering Mary Ruefle's "My Private Property"
- Jan 1, 2022: Martha Strawbridge covering Daisy Pitkin's "An Algorithm"
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2020's Advent Calendar (unthemed):
- Nov 29, Ander Monson on Living in the Delay, Outer Wilds, and Peter Orner
- Nov 30, Pamela Pierce on Melissa Faliveno, Twister, and Friday Night Lights
- Dec 1, Mike Martone and His Steam Memoir
- Dec 2, Nicole Walker, Cruelty for Christmas
- Dec 3, Wren Awry, Gnocchi on the Picket Line
- Dec 4, Hea-Ream Lee on Susan Neville's Iconography and the Sacred Daily Ritual
- Dec 5, Craig Reinbold, Yes to the Flesh?
- Dec 6, Caryl Pagel, Already Read: Notes on Angela Woodward's "Dearth"
- Dec 7, Corinna Cook, A Clockwork for the Land in Beth Peterson's "Cairns"
- Dec 8, Brooke Juliet Wonders, Instructions for Building a Dream House
- Dec 9, Genia Blum, Found in 'Found, Again' by Renée E. D’Aoust
- Dec 10, Darcy Jay Gagnon, The Blue Jay Dances to Brian Eno: Louise Erdrich and Creative Journal as Kankyō Ongaku
- Dec 11, Lucas Mann, The Road that Doesn't End: On Jill Talbot's "The Last Year"
- Dec 12, George Estreich, Vesper Flights and the Technology of Revelation
- Dec 13, Scott Morris on Sarah Viren's Generosity
- Dec 14: Bethany Maile, Exceptional Upbringings
- Dec 15, Nicole Sheets on Joanna Eleftheriou's This Way Back
- Dec 16, Susan Neville, Celluloid
- Dec 17, Kyoko Mori, Conflict and Compassion: reading Natalia Ginzburg in 2020
- Dec 18, Lauren Ostberg, Tardigrades v. Human Enterprise
- Dec 19, Brooke Champagne: Reading Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating and Cooling as Yoga for the Writer’s Mind
- Dec 20, Travis Scholl, The Frictionless Synchronicity: On Leavetakings
- Dec 21, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Recognitions: in Memory of Bill Kittredge
- Dec 22, Melissa Faliveno, Of Minutiae and Monuments
- Dec 23, Jenny Spinner: The Writer in a Pandemic: On Zadie’s Smith’s Intimations
- Dec 24, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich: The End of the World Is Also Its (Queer) Future: Joseph Osmundson’s “Fitness: How the Climate Killed My Children”
- Dec 25, Dave Griffith: On Eula Biss' On Having and Being Had
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The 2018 Advent Calendar was unthemed.
- Dec 2: Chelsea Biondolillo's Fourteen Introductions
- Dec 3: Colin Rafferty on Sound, Endings, and Nate DiMeo’s The Memory Palace
- Dec 4: John Proctor on June Jordan
- Dec 5: Lyzette Wanzer's "Finding A Way In: Teaching the Lyric Essay"
- Dec 6: Matthew Vollmer's Notes for an Essay on Special Music
- Dec 7: Patrick Madden: "heh heh heh heh" (a correspondence with Brian Doyle)
- Dec 8: Julija Šukys: Deep Roots (Thinking About “Koreans With Guns”)
- Dec 9: Silas Hansen on Sarah Einstein’s “Self-Portrait in Apologies”
- Dec 10: Matthew Gavin Frank's Stranded on Stromboli, Reading about Morality: A Conversation
- Dec 11: Paul Lisicky on Joy Williams's "Hawk"
- Dec 12: Ander Monson on Selah Saterstrom
- Dec 13: Jill Christman on Writing Sexual Trauma Under Title IX
- Dec 14: Hannah Ensor on Denise Levertov's "On the Function of the Line" (1979)
- Dec 15: Heather Wells Peterson on Brian Blanchfield's PROXIES
- Dec 16: Virginia Marshall on the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf
- Dec 17: Jennie Ziegler on Nora Ephron and Indulging Old Aches
- Dec 18: Jenn Shapland's Incendio! On Zadie Smith’s “The Shadow of Ideas”
- Dec 19: Melissa Matthewson on Virginia Woolf
- Dec 20: Susan Briante's "Little Christmas"
- Dec 21: Brian Blanchfield on the Day as a Literary Unit
- Dec 22: Joe Slocum on Brian Doyle
- Dec 23: Dorian Rolston on the Mirror
- Dec 24: Dave Griffith on Joan Didion
- Dec 25: Alison Hawthorne Deming on Bruno Latour
- Dec 31: Dave Mondy's New Year's Eve Joint
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The 2017 Advent Calendar theme was Recoveries, focusing on essays we felt were underread:
- Dec 3: Terese Svoboda on Lola Ridge
- Dec 4: Clinton Crockett Peters on Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas
- Dec 5: Lela Scott MacNeil on Betty Fussell
- Dec 6: Sarah Minor Recovering from Descent
- Dec 7: Marcia Aldrich on Anne Panning
- Dec 9: Stephen Benz on Ambrose Bierce
- Dec 10: Sonja Livingston, Toward Solace
- Dec 11: Kevin Mosby on Charles Reznikoff
- Dec 12: Dorian Rolston on Method Men
- Dec 13: Lawrence Lenhart on MFK Fisher
- Dec 14: Robert Atwan on Content & Aesthetics
- Dec 15: Brian Oliu on Scaffolding and Colin Rafferty
- Dec 16: Jenny Spinner and Patrick Madden on the Forgotten Women of the Essay
- Dec 17: T Clutch Fleischmann on Sylvia Rivera & the Personal as Now
- Dec 18: Michael Martone on James Agee
- Dec 19: Sylvia Chan on Justin Chin
- Dec 20: Alysia Sawchyn on MFK Fisher
- Dec 21: Dave Griffith, "What Makes a Life Significant?"
- Dec 22: Jill Christman on Ashley C. Ford, Brittany Means, and Alysia Sawchyn
- Dec 23: Craig Reinbold on Douglas Coupland
- Dec 24: Dave Mondy on Arthur Ashe and the Style We Leave Behind
- Dec 25: Ander Monson on Paying Attention
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2016's Advent Calendar was unthemed:
- Dec 1: Susan Neville
- Dec 2: Clinton Crockett Peters
- Dec 3: Mary Cappello
- Dec 4: Marcia Aldrich et al
- Dec 5: César Díaz
- Dec 6: Lia Purpura
- Dec 7: Sarah Sheesley
- Dec 8: Lela Scott MacNeil
- Dec 9: Thomas Mira y Lopez
- Dec 10: Steven Church
- Dec 11: Brian Oliu
- Dec 12: Meehan Crist
- Dec 13: Sarah Minor
- Dec 14: Patrick Madden
- Dec 15: Nicole Walker
- Dec 16: Lawrence Lenhart
- Dec 17: Erica Trabold
- Dec 18: Steffan Triplett & Jill Talbot
- Dec 19: Kyoko Mori
- Dec 20: Ander Monson
- Dec 21: Craig Reinbold
- Dec 22: Erin Zwiener
- Dec 23: Dave Griffith
- Dec 24: Dave Mondy
- Dec 25: Treat Yourself
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2015's Advent Calendar was themed around The Best American Essays series, and required a few extra days in our calendar...
- Nov 29: BAE 1986 read by Sven Birkerts: A Ramble Around BAE 1986, edited by Elizabeth Hardwick
- Nov 30: BAE 2014 read by Christy Wampole: November Thirteenth
- Dec 1: BAE 1996: Tests of Time by Eric LeMay
- Dec 2: BAE 2001 read by Matthew Gavin Frank
- Dec 3: BAE 1990 as read by Joni Tevis: The Traveler: An Essay and Playlist
- Dec 4: BAE 2004 with John Proctor
- Dec 5: Renée E. D’Aoust: Regarding The Best American Essays 2003
- Dec 6: BAE 1998 with Brian Doyle: I AM A GOLDEN ESSAY GOD!
- Dec 7: Robert Atwan: The Best American Essays: Some Notes on the Series, Its Background and Origins.
- Dec 8: BAE 1993 as read by Jill Talbot: Context and Observations
- Dec 9: BAE 2015: Sarah Minor on Death and Mourning the Essay in 2015
- Dec 10: BAE 2010: Composing Smart by César Díaz
- Dec 11: BAE 1987 as read by Ned Stuckey-French
- Dec 12: BAE 1988 as read by Amy Leach
- Dec 13: BAE 2008: Los Mejores Ensayos Americanos by Michele Morano
- Dec 14: Best American Essays 2005 read by Michael Martone: A Bread Crumb Memoir
- Dec 15: BAE 1992 as read by T Clutch Fleischmann
- Dec 16: Thomas Larson on BAE 1995: Man Versus Boy
- Dec 17: Stephanie G’Schwind on the BAE 2009, edited by Mary Oliver
- Dec 18: BAE 2012 Read by Thomas Mira y Lopez
- Dec 19: BAE 2002, read by Nicole Walker
- Dec 20: BAE 1991 read by Michael Steinberg
- Dec 21: Revisiting the Last Millennium: The Best American Essays 2000 by Kyoko Mori
- Dec 22: BAE 2007 as read by Mary Clearman Blew
- Dec 23: 2013 as read by Marcia Aldrich: On Being Moved: Four Takes on the Personal
- Dec 24: David L. Ulin on Best American Essays 2011
- Dec 25: Nicole Wallack on Robert Atwan's Art of the Foreword
- Dec 26: BAE 1997, read by Will Slattery
- Dec 27: BAE 1998 read by Craig Reinbold: On Annie Dillard, Fanatic
- Dec 28: Ander Monson: On Finding The Best American Essays 1999 at the Bear Canyon Goodwill
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