Help Revision the Winter Holiday!

For children — or their parents, older siblings or relatives who act as spotlights and mirrors for the younger ones — the gatherings around the last helf of December are (usually) golden times. For some of us though, those who don’t necessarily have the blanket of family to insulate us from all the other stuff that encroaches, the winter holiday can be challenging for a few reasons.

Well, we see an opportunity here. To say Boo! to these blues. To say create, say imagine, say have fun of a somewhat serious kind.

And to do this, The Journal of Wild Culture has a little proposal.

We’d like to publish, with your help, a series of pieces that explore our thoughts on how to revision, rethink, reinvent and maybe even remake the winter holiday. How might it be better or different, or more of what it already is? If you had the power to change it all, what would you change? Imagine, 25 years from now, if there were some ideas that caught, how could it improve?

And, so as not to slight the golden past (for much good’s been had!), we also want to remember what was so beautifully and unassailably wonderful about certain memories we still carry around, and how some things should just stay put. We’ll call those The Gold Bits.

Plus, don't forget about rituals, and what aspect of the sacred needs to be preserved or improved.

Here's a short list of what you could send us.

Stories, essays, anecdotes, micro-ruminations, poems, drawings, paintings, cartoons, photographs, moving pictures, quotes or cuttings (favourite text passages), songs (new carols?), architectural sketches, apochryphal PowerPoint data charts, recipes, new fangled holiday sippables, architectural napkin sketches, hangable fireside giving artifact pouches, insanely mirthful dinner hats, costumes and hairstyles, festivity plants that might include ornaments, just maybe? You get the idea.

It's there in our collective big brain, so let’s show it to each other.

We’ll run as many as we can until December 25th, and then we're going to take a rest (phew!). Everyone who sends a contribution becomes an SPWC Member Contributor (unless you say, no thanks), which means you will then be able to put the letters F.S.P.W.C. — Fellow of the Society for the Preservation of Wild Culture — after your name. (And yes, we’re working on badges, buttons and blazers. In time.)

Send your submission to re-visions@wildculture.com. And, please include a 3-4 sentence bio about yourself.

Oh, one more thing. If you're not able to contribute any of the above to our campaign, you could also go here, to the DONATIONS PAGE, and help the little folk in the workshop at the SPWC put the website together before you know and his . . . oh, never mind.

[APOLOGIES TO THE SUB-EQUATORIANS.]

Illustrations, top and bottom, by Roxanna Bikadoroff.

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