Events / Holiday Mail Art Cards for You!
When:December 4th, 2008 @ 12:00am TO December 18th, 2008 @ 12:00am
Where:
Wherever you are
Everywhere
Activity:
Holiday
Enrollment
12/unlimited
Organizer:
zer0gee
Description:
I don't like the traditional winter holidays. I grew up in a split family and spent all my childhood Christmases being dragged from one house to another. It sucked. However, I do like giving and receiving gifts. I also like making and sending mail art.
So, here's what I'm offering all of you, my SF0 compatriots - make up a winter holiday that you would like me to help you celebrate (or use the traditional ones if you want - just cuz I don't like them doesn't mean you don't), and I will make a card for that holiday and send it to you, just because I love all of you and SF0 so much. All of you are welcome to participate, whoever you are, wherever you live.
Sign up here, comment below with your holiday if you want to, and message me with your holiday and mailing address. I would also be happy to send a card to someone else instead (perhaps a non-player?) on your behalf if you prefer. Please sign up before December 18th so I have enough time to make and mail the cards before the end of the month.
I look forward to sending cards to you! Have a lovely holiday - whatever yours may be.
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I won't ask for a card, because it's not something I've ever made a public observance out of, but reading about your experience and why you don't like the standard ones made me want to pass this along. My life has been better at least in that regard and I'm quite fine celebrating Christmas even though I don't believe in its traditional meaning - but I've got something on my wintertime calendar that a lot of people don't.
It's not something to "celebrate" in the traditional sense, and while I've mentioned it to others before it isn't one I evangelize for - but for several years now I've observed a private week of reflection and mourning ending on February 1 (so beginning with January 26, chosen to make it last a week). The closest to real festivities I ever got was when I was living in a single room, when I lit candles on the 27th, the 28th, and the 1st - the anniversaries of the events that I reflect on every year at that time.
As a child many people have a personal hero. Perhaps they want to be like Michael Jordan or some other athlete, or if they're liable to grow up a nerd they might idolize Edison or Einstein instead. I never really had one, but the closest I came was Gus Grissom, who died on January 27, 1967 when a training exercise killed him and his Apollo 1 crewmates Roger Chaffee and Ed White. The day after the nineteenth anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire, the Space Shuttle Challenger was launched for the tenth and final time, and all seven crew members were killed. I was born later that year, and grew up with an optimism and enthusiasm for space that I inherited from the earlier Apollo generation - but the enthusiasm was inevitably tempered by a youth spent in the shadow of the Challenger disaster. And then on February 1, 2003, I was a junior in high school and was spending the day competing in the Science Olympiad competition. I had just gotten back from one of the more difficult events I was in, involving an engineering project I'd been working on with my best friend for several months beforehand, and heard the news from our coach: the Space Shuttle Columbia had been destroyed during re-entry.
The following year was the first time I set aside that week to remember the seventeen people lost during that time, and everyone else who has risked their life for humankind's pursuit of knowledge.
A lot t.v.'s were wheeled into classrooms that morning in 1986 to watch a shuttle launch. I remember being bummed out that ours wasn't one of them. A few years later, when I finally saw the footage, I'm glad I didn't get to watch that live.
I also bow my head for Yuri and Laika.
I unfortunately was in one of the classrooms that watched it live. The AFB I was living in at the time was one of the emergency landing sites should something go wrong, and a lot of my friends parents had something to do with the shuttle in one way or another.
It was a terrible day, and I was proud to be sitting in the Viewing Room at Kennedy when the first shuttle to be launched after Challenger made it safely up.
If we have any NASA/space fans on here I can get you stuff from Cape Kodiak (The Other Cape). My dad works there. PM me and let me know.
I've spent so much of my life being the kid of someone who works for NASA that I forget it still is a wonderful thing.
I really don't know which is more obscure. It starts in January, so no rush there. How about you ZG?
Don't you mean "Cab Callowanzaa"?
Cab Callowanzaa is celebrated annually on the 25th of December in observance of the birth of Cab Calloway.
You stomp your feet to the Calloway Boogie to keep you groovy twenty-four hours a day.
Families gather together to foo a little bally-hoo around a dinner of Chickenbird. The little ones makin' rhythm on the tom-tom in their tum-tums. Davy gives with the gravy, Hannah brings bananas, tomatoes from Plato, and pancakes from Mandrake.
At night, after things get quiet, if you listen closely, you can hear the Hi-De-Ho Miracle Man steppin' light on your roof being hep, being fly. In the morning, your socks are filled with happy feet.
I think I'd like you even better if you had more C. M. in you.
one and twenty days
december marks my affair,
of course; haiku day.
YULE, BEEYATCHES!!!!
Wussup for Pagan Pride. Yeeeaaa!
*oontz oontz oontz oontz*
*and Chanukhah and Christmas, we celebrate all three in my family*
heh, mine, too. I also celebrate each of the relevant New Year's Days on the general principle that this world could use more chances for fresh starts....
Sometimes I wished I lived on Mercury, so I could have my yearly reset button pressed every 88 days. Of course, 800 degree summers would suck, but -300 degree winters on the dark-side wouldn't be too much different from Chicago.
I don't really subscribe to any of the holidays, but I do try to do things to mark them. It seems like whether or not I subscribe to Christmas, Thanksgiving or New Years, I feel pretty pathetic if I don't do something to mark it.
I think there should be a holiday designed solely around baking and eating pumpkin pies with cool whip and/or ice cream. Oh, and home made chex mix. That's always my favorite bit anyway.
You know what's wrong with this idea? What if we want to send you holiday cards? What then?
But regardless, allow me to tell you of a holiday in an official capacity as the founder and president of the Ezra Buckley Society. The Celebration of Encirclement takes place every December 31st. This holiday is a celebration of the myriad of weak ties and minor relationships that make up our lives, of the many important interactions that allow our lives to function but that are normally uncelebrated. It is also a chance for Citizens to give back to the many noncitizens that surround them in their day to day to life. It is therefore notable for being the most public of the Masked Nation's rituals and the only one that most noncitizens will have heard of.
It is celebrated by rising before dawn, dressing from head to toe in brightly color clothing, wearing special celebratory masks and anonymously performing charitable acts, giving small tokens of appreciation, and distributed short (very short - often less than five words) messages of thanks, all the while maintaining complete silence. These activities are largely done before noon, after which citizens gather for public dancing and music (no singing however - complete silence is maintained for the entire day) and a grand feast.
Thematic Associations:
Colors: Orange, Green, Light Red
Foods: Candied Fruits, Eggs, Carrots, Small Chocolates Cakes, Rice Pudding, Pinto beans
Clothes: Robes, Crowns, Sashes, Saris, Shirts with bells on the sleeves, Slippers
Other: Calligraphy, Blue paper, Objects left in high places, Tea Sets, Desks
Oh wow. This is f*ing it. Rings true inside and makes eyes wateryshiny. Thanks.
The one thing I do not miss about Minnesota is thinking of dates in March as being candidates for the status of winter holiday.
It's cool that we're all talking about holidays here, but if you want a card, you have to message me with your address and holiday of choice! Only one of you has so far...
I've just realized that we have NO winter holidays in New Zealand... I can't even find one close. What is it about modern western cultures that they have no norther hemisphere summer holidays... You can't MOVE June - August in Japan without hitting one. The CLOSEST we have is Easter... Oh, and Queens birthday, but it's more a bank holiday than a holiday per se...
Confuse your friends and neighbors... steal America's.
Well, yes, but we HAVE the American ones, it's just that we have them at the beach in summertime... I SUPPOSE you guys have 4th July, but in the Dominion of New Zealand it seems wrong to celebrate the empire getting theirs... And "midwinter christmas" seems... sad somehow when people try for it in June...
I suppose I could steal O-bon, or just fall back on Queens birthday, but neither of them really seem card-like...
I think you're right Zerogee, make up my own it is, and at 6 months out it'll give me plenty of time to let you know before then ;->
It's a Festivus for the rest of us! I am embracing that holiday damnit!
I want to get a postcard, but don't know a proper holiday for it! And also I'm late!
Can I get one that celebrates that it will get lighter again after the 21st and that this year was so very fantastic and that I will be able to spend a couple of days with my lovely sister?
This would be the "yay!light-fantstico-Gunda-holiday" that starts on 23rd and will take as long as it's fun, so maybe a week?
And I don't mind if the postcard comes later!
Happy Newtonmas everybody!
(and merry Cab Callowanzaa C.M.)
Thanks man. Merry Joyeaux to everyone!
Cards are being made, I promise! I want to mail them all out at once, so everyone gets them at roughly the same time. Being a retail manager, this season allows me much less creative time than most, so the going is slow, but it's going! :) Thanks for your patience, recipients!
Screw that. I'm going to send out the ones I have this coming Friday, and keep working on the rest. Please let me know when you receive them - feel free to post photos if you want to.
Next batch goes out this coming Friday! Please don't forget to let me know when/if you receive yours - not everyone from the last mailing has yet, and I worry. Thanks!
My winter holiday is Catmess. On Catmess eve, we play with all of our old toys, roll in catnip, and eat tunafish before going to bed. On Catmess morning, we open all the new toys, play with the wrapping paper, listen to our Jingle Cats CDs, and eat more tunafish before taking a nap.
I love Catmess.