Celebrate :: A Collection

In January I signed up for Ali Edwards online class called One Little Word.  This is my second time taking the class and I've continued to enjoy it (even when I haven't been able to keep up with the monthly pace).  The photo above is my response to the assignment called:  "Put your word out in the world."  On a Sunday afternoon I outlined the word celebrate on our dead end and left some chalk out there to see what would happen.  My kids were the first to have at it, but lots of people added to the design.  Tuesday the street cleaner swept it away, and new drawings have since appeared.  Fun.

Last year, my word was flexible, which meant something to me, but didn't have much resonance out in the world, and that was ok.  But this year, celebrate has popped up in public contexts, and I'm slowly building a collection of celebrate-sightings that makes me happy.

Here are a few of the most recent encounters:

• Christine Carter, author of Raising Happiness, wrote a blog post entitled:  Happiness Tip:  Celebrate!  
• Katrina Kenison, author of Magical Journey (reviewed here) uses the tagline "celebrating the gift of each ordinary day," on her website.  
• And best for last...this just made me laugh...In Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2, which I saw with the kids this weekend, the main character, Flint Lockwood, invents a device called The Celebration-ator.  It's a "party-in-a-box" which detonates whenever his monkey Steve hears the word celebrate, spewing cloyingly cheerful confetti and brightly colored paint all over anyone in its vicinity.  The Celebration-ator ends up being one of Flint's greatest public humiliations as an inventor and catapults him onto his narrative arc for the movie. 

Having chosen the word celebrate for the year, I am aware that I'm at risk of becoming a bit of a Celebration-ator, myself.  And I couldn't stop laughing at this amazing visual representation of the way that celebration, as a word and practice, can fail in a particularly spectacular fashion.  

Apologies to anyone who has had to endure my own version of the Celebration-ator, as I'm sure I've gone down this path more than once.  Hopefully my own character arc is as forgiving as Flint's.  

Cheers, everyone!  Have a great week.