Is it possible to include countdowns in nodes?
There is jquery_countdown for general purpose countdown display, though the way you would integrate this depends on what you want to countdown. Using this module it is quite easy to display a countdown based on a node field value. Unfortunately there is no display configuration in the UI. But you could use hook_node_view() to add a countdown to a node view like this:

$node-&gt;content['countdown'] = theme('jquery_countdown', array(
  'id' =&gt; 'jquery_countdown-' . $node-&gt;nid,
  'options' =&gt; array(
    'until' =&gt; date("F d, Y g:i:s a", $some_timestamp),
    'format' =&gt; 'dHMS',
    'compact' =&gt; TRUE,
  ),
));