Advent Christmas

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The Advent Christmas events are an annual tradition in which raocow's fandom sends him a package of Christmas gifts to be opened over the course of December like an advent calendar.

Overview

Every year since 2014, the community has compiled a box or other collection of Christmas gifts to send to raocow, with the gifts assigned to a given day between November 30th and December 25th; upon receiving the package, raocow then records a video of himself opening and reacting or responding to each day's gift. These collaborations were initially organized by Spitznagl, with RedMageSusie taking over after Spitznagl passed away.

Each event is assigned a special name by raocow or the organizer(s), usually an acronym based on another notable event that year, and members of the fandom sign up to claim specific days for their gifts. The gifts are frequently hand-made like fan art and letters, and while the packages are traditionally physical some members provide entirely-digital gifts, including videos, music, useful resources for raocow's upcoming LPs, levels made for Super Mario World or Super Mario Bros X, and even entire original games. Unplanned "ambush" gifts have also been increasingly common each year, with raocow receiving surprise DMs on the forum and Steam gifts.

Beginning with 2020, the format of the events changed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with raocow telling the community to make the packages entirely digital. For that year and 2021, prominent SMBX developers came together to create an ASMT spinoff game to serve as the main package with RedMageSusie organizing a separate collection of stand-alone digital gifts. Whether this trend will continue for a third year, or whether there will continue to be a digital component once the community returns to sending physical packages, remains to be seen.