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Happy holidays fellow Likers!
On behalf of the team at Liketu and myself, we wish you all a happy Christmas. We are a small budding community but growing everyday, and our mission is to be welcoming, inclusive and of course rewarding to anyone and everyone willing to join us.
I always love the holiday "vibe" before and during Christmas. The scented candles, the Michael Buble and Frank Sinatra holiday music, the Christmas lights, presents under the tree (even though as adults we really don't need presents as if we really wanted something, we'd probably have bought it already!) It's a truly wonderful time of the year.
I've thought about this a whole lot lately. Kids love tangible presents because they usually get presents (most of the time toys) from Santa that they wouldn't otherwise be able to afford on their own. Even in the wealthiest countries in the world, children don't have the deposable income to buy $50+ Lego sets or the latest video games. They love Christmas time because of the tangible, material abundance it represents. They get toys!
As adults, we don't judge them for being materialistic, in fact, we encourage it because deep down we know there's nothing wrong with wanting a better life! Material goods are part of the equation, and on Christmas morning parents and carers live vicariously through their kids. No matter what spiritual gurus say, more "stuff" can absolutely make you happy.
Christmas is a reminder we're all far richer than we realize.
Of course, toys or presents aren't the only thing that can make people happy.
Adults tend to enjoy the Christmas season because of the intangibles that gifts are a proxy for : family, togetherness, well-being and taking a few days off work to be with your loved ones. The gifts are just an excuse to get together, because even if you have all the money in the world, you can't buy friends and family.
Christmas symbolizes the cumulative joy of material abundance and the emotional abundance of friends, family, community. Unlike previous eras in human history defined by war, famine, suffering and starvation as a default existence.. we enjoy prosperity as the default. That's worth celebrating!
Challenge / Giveaway #4
I procured Jeremy Schaefer from @pfunk winning the auction and paying 500 HIVE for the pleasure to own him. He is a special punk because as @pfunk has noted, he is the #hivepunk Grinch. Like a parent being able to live vicariously through gifting, I am giving him away to one of you special likers!
The Grinch once said:
I don't need anything more for Christmas than this right here. My family.
And thus, the theme of Challenge #4 is Family at Christmas.
How are you spending this Christmas? What presents did you give/receive? Who are you spending Christmas with? Why is Christmas a special time for you?
All participants will get a vote from @liketu, but the winner of Jeremy Schaefer will goto the post from the person who embodies the Christmas family spirit the most. Make it a good one!
*Edit: You must make this post on liketu.com (it's a liketu sponsored challenge!)
You will have until 26th Midnight to enter!
Cheers, and Merry Christmas to Hive and the Liketu fam!
For the best experience view this post on Liketu
My family hails from the Midwest. We celebrate the holiday like most other families. We gather. We eat. We share gifts. Laughs. Moments. The thing we don't do well is talk. In a time where rules and routines become matters of life and death, the unspoken can easily carry an enormous weight.
This year presents a year and a challenge like no other for those of soft-spoken Midwestern descent. We have the freedom to gather but an unending complexity of rules to abide by. Masking. Distancing. Testing. These new gates keep our family from the traditions of the past. Protections carefully considered for potential years ahead for those who are hanging by threads to this life. A seemingly simple decision holding unforeseeable ripples for the fragile.
In between are the children. Some so young they can barely remember a Christmas without masks, rules, and risks to calculate. Forced to bear the burden of being a gift for the elders and a responsibility for the parents, they stride ever so gently into each new experience, increasingly aware that the invisible danger hangs over each tradition, ever so slightly. Parents, eager to assure them that the abnormal is something better accepted than fought, portray the rules as routine. Fully aware they are anything but.
I will celebrate this holiday divorced from the nuclear family I was raised in. A sign of the time we are all persevering through. My only child, deprived of one set of grandparents to perhaps protect another, a more delicate set. My adult siblings, caught in between.
In the end, family is malleable. Sculpture formed through words and deeds, not blood. Now, we make each season and each tradition out of the best of what we have to bear. This year, it may just be my child and my partner with whom I share the bounty of a Christmas morning. But I know the rest of my family, whether chosen or blood, lay waiting. Somewhere, more protected in the distance. In a future that seems each year farther away. And yet, there is hope for something more. Something closer. That is the Christmas Spirit that will hold my family this year.
I wish all of yours the very same hope. And that we will all see days much simpler and more joyous ahead.
Can you make this a post on liketu.com?
The challenge is to drive activity and engagement on the new front-end. Give it a try, it's harmless.
I love this hivepunk Grinch! Will share what we do during these Christmas days. We don't live in the same country as our family, so for us, it's only our own little family of 3 celebrating together. Last year was the first year that we were able to place a tree in our home (the other apartment was too small) so we decided to make it look nice and cosy in our home. I'm the one taking care of the presents, although these are mostly for our daughter, with only 3 exceptions for ourselves. We use Christmas as an excuse to buy ourselves new perfume. :)
During the night, when we're 100% sure our daughter is not going to walk in to catch Santa red-handed (she was mentioning that last night, lol) we placed all the presents around the Christmas tree and I also wrote a letter from Santa which was pretty stressful to print, I was so afraid she'd wake up from the sound. But not it's almost 7 am here, and she's still sleeping like a baby. I seriously can't wait for her to walk in and be all excited about these presents and the letter from Santa.
During the holidays I make sure we have healthy as well as less healthy but tasty food so that we don't have to stress about the eating part during these days, it will kill the holiday spirit. As soon as she's awake, I will put on Christmas songs in the background and we will just enjoy time together without having to work or go to kindergarten.
Not to forget, we will also decorate a gingerbread house today or tomorrow. I already baked the parts for it, we only need to do the creative and fun part now. This is something we'll enjoy so much, and I'm curious to see how she decides to decorate her own house this year.
Merry Christmas!
Just a polite reminder that the posts considered will need to be posted on liketu.com as a standalone post.
oh my bad, I read that, then clicked further and forgot that somehow. I don't know liketu so that's the reason for missing that.. will see if I can make that happen in time..
As many of you may know in 2016 I met Sarah on Steemit and within two years we were married and I moved to Britain.
What I haven’t really talked about was how I left my family behind, which wouldn’t have been that big of a deal because I assumed that we could always visit, but then Covid happened!.. And not only that, I came down with a condition where I have too much fluid on my brain that caused blindness, hearing loss and it could be fatal for me to fly due to the increase in cabin pressure in planes.
Before I left America, I was helping to raise my niece and nephew, I stayed with them for at least six months out of every year, so they wouldn’t end up in daycare or raised by strangers over the summers and while their parents were out of town on business.
At the time of the wedding, they were at that age were they were both driving and they didn’t really need me anymore, but none of us expected that we would be apart for so long and even though this is illogical, I kinda felt like I abandoned them.
So after four years, the whole family decided to spend Christmas with Sarah and me by embarking on a Griswald-style European Vacation, where literally everything has gone wrong, due to all the newly announced Covid rules.
They’ve been through hell trying to get to Britain, denied access to some countries, missed flights, lost reservations and are forced to pay thousands in fees and for new accommodations, but against all odds, they finally arrived on Christmas Eve.
I know there is a Grinch on the line for this post, but I hate to say it, but this is sort of on the back burner, something I’m writing during bathroom breaks, because I haven’t had more than a few moments to myself since they arrived and there is no way that I will be able to get Sarah to edit this one.
At the moment, Sarah’s family is here, getting to know my family for the first time. We just finished eating and opening presents and now everyone is gearing up to play Cards Versus Humanity and Pinctionary. My niece is very gregarious, so she tends to do most of the talking, with all her crazy stories about college life.
My nephew on the other hand seems kinda shy, but once you get him alone, everything comes rushing out and it’s usually some sort of mischief that his parents aren’t even aware of. I haven’t had the chance to get him away from the crowd yet, to figure out what’s been going on with him and I’m dying to know the real story of what he’s actually been up to.
Unfortunately my mom couldn’t make this trip and it’s not something that I really want to write about, because she has health issues and I have no idea when I’ll be able to see her again.
The main present was seeing my family and this trip was all of their Christmas presents to us and to each other. Although they didn’t arrive empty handed because my mom sent some computer components with them, so I could build a desktop pc, because my vision is no longer good enough for laptops. Sarah and me bought each other Punks on Hive as an early Christmas present, I gave her Viviana Manning and she gave me Aliza Hubbard, which I totally got the better end of that deal.
Family means everything to me and they’re here, right now, so I need to go and enjoy Christmas with them. I hope all of you are having a happy Christmas too.
What a story! I hope you will win :) Enjoy the long-awaited time with the family <3
Thank you so much!
I was talking to @elmerlin earlier and he said that we needed to repost our entries as a standalone post using liketu.com, so I reposted mine and you may want to do the same to make sure you qualify.
I saw his comment, but I prefer to write another post today so I'm hoping for you to win this one :) thanks for letting me know though!
I deleted my entry and reposted it, trying to break the paragraphs up, so it wouldn't be one long block of text, but this is the best I could do.
I forgot to say, that all my challenges are run on liketu.com so I would appreciate it if you make this post on liketu.com !
This was just a comment, I posted my original entry using liketu.com so hopefully that counts and I would post this using liketu.com, but I can't seem to find your comment on there, so I am having to use an alternative frontend.
Oh, I didn't see it on liketu.com, did you make it a standalone post??
And because it's Christmas time, a bit of Christmas Grinch Spirit lol
(Gonna also drop in hivepunks discord channel to everyone who wants to download it)
Congratulations @elmerlin!
You raised your level and are now an Orca!
Check out the last post from @hivebuzz:
Support the HiveBuzz project. Vote for our proposal!
Wow this punk looks lit maybe i will have some free time during christmas to make my entry and share my christmas experience ;)
Is this going till midnight?
Hello.
Are you using Discord? There are a few things I would like to talk about liketu.
I would like to tell about the problem I had on Liketu. I love sharing here, but I started to have some difficulties because of the problems. First of all, I have to say that my English is not very good. So please forgive me.
First of all, I'm having trouble with the photo editing page. When I press edit, the editing tools do not appear in the window that opens. I have to constantly refresh the page and reload it. After a few tries, I finally edit the first photo. I'm having the same problems when I switch to the second photo.
Apart from these, there is also the problem of scrolling the page. I'm having trouble getting down to the writing part. The page remains as you see above.
Another problem is the options section on the yacht side. This place is intertwined, creating confusion. Sometimes I can write wrong when choosing. I thought the error was caused by me, but a few of my friends started to have the same problems. When publishing an article, I have to constantly rewrite and edit from scratch because of these problems. I just started experiencing this again while writing an article and somehow I wanted to tell you about this problem.
By the way, even if I opened the page with the desktop option, the problem did not change. The same thing happens on my computer. Sorry if I kept you busy. I just wanted to express my problem. I wish you good work.
Sorry about this, we're aware of the quirky responsiveness of the site on mobile at this time.
We do have a dedicated mobile version coming very soon and we've reworked the responsiveness on the upload page to address a couple of your outlined concerns here.
I'm glad to hear that. I will wait impatiently. Thank you 😊
Esta no es la primera publicación que participa en el reto navideño, espero que les guste. https://www.liketu.com/@redchill/lights-of-hope