2025
Like millions of other little grrls, our two precocious lil cuties became obsessed with K Pop Demon Hunters this year. In fact, by my count, about 20% of girls this last Halloween were dressed as Rumi, Mira, or Zoey. Indeed, Lan and I dressed up as Derpy and Sussie. Both Addie and Rey can sing all 5 hit songs, and both have watched it multiple times.
I was resistant and Initially freaked out by the movie’s suggested mania for style, makeup, and pop culture virality I got off the promos, and which I am terrified will poison the these two brilliant and independent little minds. But that’s is the world they are inheriting, however much it confuses this old fart, and after watching it with them, I was impressed by the themes, and pleased with how they poked loving fun at this manifestation of fandom. Interestingly, We recently rewatched Encanto and realized that both had about the same theme of the well-intentioned but corrosive effect of secrets and denial.
Both grrls were dead set on having Huntrix as their Holly Days’ calendar theme, and they each selected and helped to search for which portraits they wished to use. I made a ballot so we could all vote for which character would represent which principal, but after Rey filled hers out, she was so thoughtful and convincing about her choices that I canceled the election and gave her the honors to make the selection by herself. I think she did a really good job!
It makes me very happy that Rey has learned what each of the principals represents and actually participates in reflecting on them in this most significant part of the tradition for me. I don’t know if Karenga was inspired by the Jewish days of Awe when he created Kwanza, but both are seminal to our Holly Days celebration.
Part of my motive in this creation is to make a panhuman ritual, not focused on identitarian or sectarian divisions. I’m glad Holly Days managed to catch the K Wave. I hope its inclusive for-all-humankind theme can manage to resonate with folks from every culture around the world.
2024
Addie is blossoming. Delightfully, she has a bit of a love affair with a couple of adult women, one a librarian, Nicole, who won Addie over by gushing to everyone about how she was the first kid to complete the 1000 books before kindergarten challenge at the library (we love the library!). The other is a counter person named Raven at a local donut shop, who loves to hear Addie’s little voice say her name, something she frequently does, tho most often referring to her sister. She was able to participate in the design this year, requesting pix of the white Pomeranian puppy, Snowball.
Her toddlerdom makes her pretty competitive with Rey these days, so I decided to made both calendars nearly identical to quench potential sibling rivalry. She gave me some notes on color balance, but finally approved the copy.
Raven chose silly puppies (don’t you dare call them cute puppies!) There were a few I thought were hilarious holding funny chew toys, but which she found scary, so we swapped them out for some cute, but silly, pugs.
2023
This year I get to do two! I’m recycling Rey’s from 2020 for Adi, using updated Paw Patrol characters. Adi, about exactly 22 months today has crazy sophisticated language skills. Incredibly cute to hear such a tiny person try so hard to get her still uncoordinated little lips around such big words and complex sentences.
It’s being pretty fun explaining all this to her and amping up her Holly Days/Xmas/Chanukah expectations. Adi’s not as obsessed with the Pups as Rey was, she seems to prefer Mickey Mouse and Bluey, but she’s still a bit of an expert so I went with Pups, replacing Mayor Humdinger with the adorable and Floraesque Liberty, and Captain Turbot with Tracker.
Rey, seeming unsettlingly adult these days, made a request for Llamas, tho I’m not sure why, I think mostly just because they are cute, which was confirmed during my collecting of Llama images. Rey has become really expert in a particularly cutesy little-animal art style, and I discovered dozens and dozens of “How To Draw” click-batey websites for kids featuring Llamas. I used the surprisingly similar drawings for my first draft.
It was weak and not improved by adding Incan mandalas or a Machu Pichu background. Instead I searched head shots of real Llamas and Alpacas, which are pretty funny. I made a sort of checkerboard of halos of a pair of Incan mandalas featuring Llamas, hardened up the font and came up with this, which I really like. I’ve yet to begun the whole convoluted process of finding tiny gifts (mostly toys, as parents have requested no Advent Candy) that will fit and the crazy hot-glue-&-razor-knife crafting project of sealing them all into liquor boxes (now my goto for their standard dozen-bottle dividers and heavy cardboard construction after abandoning muffin tins), but this whole process is one of my opening shot rituals of Holly Days, and it’s really getting me in the mood!
2022
Kids always seem to cycle through popular culture obsessions that eventually become embarrasign to them. Tho I can tell that she still has a warm place in her heart of the Pups and the Ponies, Rey would never wear her old pup themed gear to school. This year she saw and fell in love with the wonderful Encanto. I was struck by how the poster for the film already resembles an advent calendar, and so chose it to anchor her calendar this year. Its big departure, appropriate to her development and reading skills that the formal grid ordering of previous calendars has given way to a chaotic search-and-find design of more traditional advent calendars.
The poster only has nine characters, but we needed twelve so Rey picked some extras and we figured out where to photoshop them to this image of the Casita, which conveniently had unused doors and windows, as a well as Rey’s favorite character, the lovable Chispi the Capybara in the foreground.
She, I, and Nini also had a long and complex discussion (complete with worksheets) of which characters best represented which Holly Day principals. In the end, Rey had veto rights, and these assignments reflect her sensibilities.
It was a much more difficult build with all the differing shapes and areas available for the cavities behind each day, but it really feels like an advent calendar this year. Knowing how Addie zooms in on whatever Rey is doing, I also made one to keep her occupied (a reworking of Rey’s snowflake one) with a tiny plastic house cat for each day, all in all, about the limit of what a 10 month old can appreciate.
Man o man, love those two grrls more every day!!
2021
Rey helped me build this year’s advent calendar. She understands the basics of Photoshop, how layers and masks work, and how to use selections and the magic wand, she really likes the magic wand. She had somehow discovered My Little Pony, and they were right in her tiny wheelhouse, all pink and sweet.
She had watched an updated New Generation movie with her grandpa (who confessed to having slept through much of it when she asked him to confirm various details to me), and which I mistakenly identified as The Next Generation. Lil pedant that she is, she always corrects me, and trickster trekkie than I am, I always call them The Next Generation to tease her. All this earned them a place on her Holly Days calendar this year.
I had already downloaded images of the Mane Six original Ponies and their, um, Deity? Celestia, as well as the Mane Five of the New Generation to get to the 12 required, but I needed her help to decide which pony should represent which principal and to pick a background. So she and I Netflixed and chilled on the couch with My Little Pony: Best Gift Ever about the Pony’s own secular remix holiday: Hearth’s Warming Eve. I showed her how to do screen grabs with shift+command+3, and she picked a bunch of cool backgrounds of bedazzled and snow-covered Canterlot tableaus.
We opened PS and she sat on my lap as she painted out the extraneous parts of the Pony portraits on their layer’s masks, and dragged them around to match their personalities with the principals. Twilight Sparkle is Rey’s main jam, so she insisted that we meticulously add a couple layers around her alicorn horn with the pinkish-purple glow and sparkles that indicate Twilight’s operative magical activity.
We both agreed that all the BGs were way too busy, distracting from the ponies themselves, so went back, sliding back and forth along the video’s timeline to find a better moment. We grabbed a few, and chose this sparkly rainbow that was a bumper into the credit sequence. She used the layer’s opacity sliders to mix the rainbow with some snowflake layers, and to set the transparency of Wilson Bentley’s snowflake photos that I had used in her 2018 calendar, and that we decided to leave to frame each pony.
Holy cow! How I love that little grrl!!!!
2020
Rey loves the Paw Patrol, she is not alone. Last year on NPR, on Live From Here, Chris Thile said he had spent the summer playing Paw Patrol in the park with his son, and on Ask Me Another, Ophira Eisenberg started an impromptu rendition of the theme song, and everyone else on the show joined her. It is a delightful program, with the pups acting like dogs, using their mouths (and high tech backpacks) never their paws, and are all relentlessly brave, sweet, and generous despite having some endearing faults, and the antagonist, Mayor Humdinger, is not at all evil, just selfish and short sighted, and is always forgiven and apologetic in the end.
There was a time when Rey’s obsession with the pups led us to do a pause on pup products. But her imaginative universe has since broadened to include all sorts of other cartoon characters and various archetypes, with the pups now mostly e pluribus unum these days. This lead me to allow them into HollyDays, especially since the positive values that we stress in HollyDays fit so well with the values embodied in pups and their friends.
2019
The curved edges here were because I had originally used a muffin tin as the base in the first one. However, it is very hard to find toys that fit in a muffin tin, and we didn’t want to give her candy, as is usual with advent calendars. For 2019, I got a liquor box of about the right size (it was Cointreau) with 12 dividers which I cut down. Interestingly, wrapping it with hot glue worked incredibly well, and I may convert from Scotch Tape next year for all presents.
2018
This is the first calendar I made for Rey. The snowflake images are actually taken from the first photographs of snowflakes taken by the citizen scientist, Wilson Bentley, at his farm in Jericho, Vermont, with a homemade device he built in his barn with a microscope and a bellows camera. In 1885, at the age of 19, he became the first known person to photograph a snowflake. They are drawn from the more than 5,000 snowflakes Bentley photographed during his life
This is a rejected version from 2018, using a Thomas Kincade background I rejected due to my distaste for his business model (among other things). Still, he somehow highlighted the strange power of an image of a lighted home seen from outside in the cold and dark, which is crazy primal:
HOLLY DAYS 