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.

We’re running a little behind, so playing catch up today by posting our first and second day picks along with our choice for December 3rd.

Our Day 2 choice? Clear, iOS’s best and most beautiful list-maker.

Wonderful Day is a different sort of one-dollar reminders app. It’s there to remind you of the things you’d like to get done, not the things you have to do. Although it sports an attractive visual design, it suffers from a handful of crucial failings that make it less useful than it could be.

Earlier this year, Realmac Software and Impending released Clear, a bold and innovate to-do list app for the iPhone. Despite the seemingly never-ending supply of task managers in the App Store, Clear managed to set itself apart with its unique interface, gestures and clean design.

Fast forward to today, and Realmac Software is bringing Clear to the Mac. How does such a gesture-driven app live and breathe on the desktop? On the Mac, Clear is a fresh and enjoyable way to manage tasks. It’s apps like Clear that show the convergence between iOS and OS X.

Helpless and lost in a whirlwind of tasks I can never remember to complete—that’s me without a good todo app on my side. And so, since my last favorite app started having issues the developers seem intent on never fixing, I decided to give the Producteev iPhone and desktop todo apps (free) a try.

Now, with my tasks nicely cloud-synced across my Macbook and iPhone, I’m finally getting stuff done again, and I think it’s safe to check “find a new favorite productivity app” off the ol’ list.

Plain text geeks, prepare for nerdgasm: Jesse Grosjean’s Folding Text app is out of beta and in the Mac App Store. Folding Text, as you may remember, is a Markdown-compatible plain text editor with special superpowers.

Another day, another todo app. There’s a bewildering variety of choice in this category, and newer phones all come with Apple’s own Reminders app, which is capable although not to everyone’s taste.

This one, oddly named DOOO, is nicer than most. For two bucks, it combines a thoughtful approach to feature design with stylish looks and a minimal, simple layout.

Agile Tortoise has today updated its Drafts app for the iPhone, as well as launching an all-new version for the iPad. I have been using the iPad version for a little while now and it turns out to be pretty fantastic. The iPad app has an all-new UI, and incorporates the additions to the new iPhone app. Let’s take a look:

Another day, another cool thing you can do with Alfred. This time it’s updating a text file of your choice, without having to leave Alfred’s friendly text input window.

Doozy is a todo app for iOS with a difference. It’s not about lists, it’s about organizing your stuff visually. Although it’s more complicated than many of its rivals, it’s also somewhat more powerful, and offers some task tracking and monitoring features we’ve never seen anywhere else.

We’re huge fans of the simplistic to-do app called Clear here at Cult of Mac. We’ve been captivated by its entrancing gestures and sexy design ever since we saw it at Macworld last month.

Following the highly-anticpated release of Clear in the App Store, Realmac Software has confirmed that the app has moved a staggering 350,000 copies since its launch on February 14th. Nice!