One of the better Yuletide traditions is the venerable holiday Advent Calendar, in which each day of December leading up to Christmas is marked off on a special calendar by opening its corresponding door to find a small gift, toy or chocolate squirreled away inside.

This year, we here at Cult of Mac decided we wanted to give our readers their very own Apple-themed advent calendar, filled with the year’s best apps, gadgets, stories and other curios. So each day in December, we’re going to lovingly peel back the door on the Cult of Mac 2012 Advent Calendar to reveal another delicious morsel, something really special that came out this year that we think every one of you should enjoy.

What’s hiding behind the door for Day 5? It’s a handy service called Pocket, formerly known as Read It Later.

If you’ve spent some time with last week’s app tip, Glympse, you’ll know it’s pretty handy to send your location info along to friends, family, or co-workers. One feature that is missing from Glympse, however, is an automatic message about when you’ll be there.

Twist, another iOS app that helps you keep folks you’re meeting up with aware of where you are, has just that — an automatic ETA message.

Microsoft’s new tablet, the Surface, is supposed to make the iPad and MacBook Air irrelevant. It’s supposed to be the best of both worlds by being a tablet/laptop hybrid. Reviews of the Surface have been mixed, and initial sales reports are indicating that Surface RT might be in trouble, because no one is buying it.

According to new research by the Boston-based brokerage firm Detwiler Fenton, Microsoft is likely to sell fewer than 1 million Surface RT units in the December quarter. To put that number in perspective, Apple sold 300,000 original iPad units on its first day of availability.

Apple’s iPads, including the new iPad mini, have become the most successful tablets every built. Almost three years after Steve Jobs introduced the original iPad, the device continues to be the king of slates, with more than half of the tablet market share. That hasn’t changed much in 2012, but Android tablets have slowly been eating away at its market share, and it may not be long before they dominate.

Keen internet users might already be familiar with speedtest.net, the website that lets you check exactly how fast your internet connection is. Now it’s available as an app too.

When you combine all the titles in Apple’s App Store with those in Google Play, you have a catalog of more than 1.4 million apps from hundreds of thousands of developers. But incredibly, more than 50% of the revenue made by these stores in the United States goes to just 25 app developers.

Apple released iTunes 11 last week, which introduced a new look and a number of new features. It also took a couple of features away, including Cover Flow and duplicate song detection. While the former appears to be dead and buried now, it looks like the latter is one its way back in a future update.

Finding an iPad mini right now is like trying to find oil; they’re out of stock almost everywhere — at least where I live in the United Kingdom. Apple retail stores are getting them in, but they sell out in no time at all. The only option for most customers, then, is to order online and endure the lengthy wait for delivery.

That’s what Reddit user ‘vinlays’ did. And after a painful five-week wait, FedEx delivered the iPad mini to his door. That’s a picture of it above.

Reader James H. contacted me today, asking, “Now perhaps you can you tell me how to make the Genius work the way it used to? I don’t even know how to make a new Genius playlist build now.”

As you may have noticed, iTunes 11 has switched a few things around. One of them is how the Genius playlists work. Previously, once you started a Genius playlist, you could save it as a stand-alone playlist, or you could replace it with the next Genius list you created. That’s a bit different now in iTunes 11.

One thing that nobody sees to have noticed with yesterday’s iOS iWork update is that Pages now tracks changes. And not just changes from other Pages documents, either – it’ll import and export tracked changes from Microsoft Word documents.

This could be huge. Or maybe it just won’t work at all.