Advent Calendar day/box 23 2007-2024
Day 23 has 2 distinct eras (with a small lil interlude for a few years between them XD). Back in 2007, my favorite (now defunct) website X-Entertainment ran a sort of ARG with a Playmobile advent calendar. It had a giant over-arching story of action, mystery, romance, conspiracy, Lego stormtroopers, playmobile rabbits and other characters, James Lipton, and a giant eldritch bunny god. Yeah that was a PACKED December that year. This was a yearly thing for a few years and ended around 2011 when the site started to come to the end of its lifespan; X-E was in my Internet life for most of my formative years in the early 2000s and VERY late 1990s. The Box 23 storylines were just wild and I was so glad to have experienced them first hand. You seriously had to be there.
When X-E closed for good, a successor site by the original webmaster Matt called Dinosaur Dracula took over. Same subject matter of neat pop culture things Matt and the rest of us grew up on. From about 2012 to maybe 2016, I still dedicated the 23rd to things for DinoDrac, like the titular mascot himself on a motor bike, channeling Napoleon, or drawing things from newsletters that I got from the Dinosaur Dracula funpack, a box of neato toys, trinkets and even snacks that comes monthly--this helps fund the website so its a nice way to support the site! 2014 was a set of fun little toys of ninja, dinosaurs, and aliens that were the guardians of Christmas XD One drawing was about getting sick on christmas, which ironically happened to me a few years ago, and all honestly? It was nice to just REST during a very hectic holiday. So man, that one was a mood.
After this short interlude, the rest of the days were dedicated to "drawing challenges" the funpack newsletters gave, like "draw a picture of any characters found in the funpack at a holiday party", "a cover to a fictional Christmas special on tape", "anti-santa", etc. Since I got into Ultraman and tokusatsu, I do a lot of drawings for that because they absolutely fit the ideas of quirky drawing subjects. They're some of my favorite parts of the month to draw. So that's why you'll see just as wacky subject matter like an Ultra fighting a kaiju gremlin XD The Christmas NiGHTS replica was for one of my favorite xmas gifts; my husband, when we started dating, tracked down a copy of this game since I never got it when I was in my big NiGHTS phase.
Anyway, that's why I think the 23rd has some of the zaniest, experimental and funnest images of the whole advent, so thanks for hanging out with the yap session and enjoy really weird, contextless drawings XD
