Today we honor those who sacrificed their lives to keep the world open and free. Peace and freedom is a never ending project that requires commitment on all levels and, unfortunately, sometimes unavoidable wars.
As a kid, I loved Astrid Lindgren’s books. Not so much Pippi Longstocking and her early series, but her grand fairy tales “The Brothers Lionheart“, “Mio, My Son” and “Ronja the Robber’s Daughter“. They are set in times of snow white messenger pigeons, black tyrants with evil dragons and plundering robbers who could have been Robin Hood’s distant cousins. Although set in a fairy tale time and landscape, they are universal and time-less, covering all human traits like good and evil, brave and cowardly, humorous and serious and love and hate. The kids in them experience horrible things but learn to overcome their fears to do what is necessary to save the world from evil and eternal darkness. “Then Jonathan said there were things you have to do, even if they are dangerous. ‘Otherwise you aren’t a human being, but just a bit if filth.’ ” – from “The Brothers Lionheart”
Ronja, The Robber’s Daughter by Astrid LindgrenMio, My Son by Astrid LindgrenThe Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren
Seeing on the news what is going on in the Middle East today makes these books more important than ever. When I read them as a kid, and again just a couple of years ago for my own kids, I could not imagine that I would see scenes from the books on the news. But that is where the world is today and we are more dependent than ever on having brave men and women defend the freedom we want to keep enjoying.
If you haven’t read these books already, now is the time!
This morning, my Facebook feed was full of photos of Swedes wearing colorful mismatched socks. That’s on a day when I had planned to blog about some fun colorful socks I recently found in a Swedish gift shop. What’s going on? To honor her older sister with Down’s syndrome, and to celebrate that difference is good, 10-year-old Nathea Anemyr had called for everyone in Sweden to rock their socks today, i.e. wear mismatched colorful socks. Many of my friends and others, even the ministers of the Swedish government, showed off their colorful mix of socks.
Police horses rocked their socks today in Lund, Sweden! From the Facebook page of “Polisen i Lund”.
Even the police horses in my home town, Lund, rocked their socks today!
Sock Rockers from Sweden, 2015
Some more digging reveals that March 21st is the UN World Down Syndrome Day which involves wearing fun socks to get people talking. So today, I mismatched my new socks for Nathea and Noelle and to celebrate the beauty of us all being different. Tomorrow, I will wear the other mismatched pair to trigger conversations about Down’s syndrome.
As I mentioned, I found the socks at the Swedish Gift store “The Gift Basket” in Geneva, IL, and they are all made by Ozone. One of the sock designs is inspired by the Swedish Dala Horse and the other one reminds me of embroidery that my mother made in the 70’s and 80’s from Swedish “Hemslöjden”. The striped ones are called “Scandinavian Stripes”.
Rock the socks – celebrate that we are all different by wearing mismatched socks on March 20. Use mismatched socks to trigger conversations about Down’s Syndrome on March 21st.
My kids wear mismatched socks every day. Even for band concerts, when black socks are required, do they manage to find two different black socks. I buy big stacks of similar socks with harmonized color schemes, so the mismatch does not get totally out of control… 😉 When I hear other moms complaining about unmatched socks gathering in their laundry room, I realize how lucky I am that my kids embrace being different every single day!
The stores are overflowing with red and rosy Valentine’s cards. Some funny, some cute and some sincere about your love for grandma, daughter, boyfriend, wife or friend. The sales of funflector® safety reflector hearts are picking up and we guess that many of them will be given away as a thoughtful little-something for Valentine’s day. Have you tried to send funflector reflectors as gifts with Valentine’s card to friends near and far? They fit perfectly in greeting cards, just double check the postage. Wether you choose a pink, red or striped heart (pst. on sale right now) – or a baseball, black car or green paw print – a reflector on a jacket or backpack will keep telling your loved ones every day that you are thinking about them and care for their safety. Isn’t that something?
We all enjoy celebrations, so of course we will go out for dinner with our loved one if we get the chance. Saturday next week is Valentine’s day, and you will find a lot of good deals at restaurants and get-away hotels. But why February 14th? Isn’t April or May more typical for affectionate love?
Curious about the origin of this romantic holiday, a couple of years ago, I set out with the Swedish “Nationalencyklopedin”, Wikipedia and some google searches to get a trustworthy basis for a blog post. But bah, what a mess! Just like the Swedish Lucia, Valentine’s day seems to be a coincidence between one or even several pagan traditions and the name in the (old) Roman Catholic Saint’s Calender on that day. Let’s recap what I found out back then:
One, and probably the most popular, legend is about the priest Valentine who was martyred about AD 270. He had befriended and fallen in love with his jailer’s daughter and left her a letter signed “from your Valentine.” However, there are several saints named Valentine connected with this day. And after all, in 1967, they were removed from the Roman Catholic saints calender since there was too little known about their deeds and lives.
Another theory is that the traditions of Valentine’s day come from the Roman celebration of Juno, Queen of the Roman Gods and Goddesses, which was followed by the Festival of Lupercalia. By drawing names from a jar, girls and boys were randomly paired to be partners during the festival and or course some partnership turned into love affairs. Later on, the church tried to tone down the tradition by using saints’ instead of the girls’ names to be drawn.
Funflector safety reflectors make perfect gifts for those you love and is easy to send with a Valentines card.
“Nationalencyklopedin” states that today’s celebrations stem from a pagan belief that the birds started to mate on this day. However, reading in wikipedia make me think that the pagan belief might have originated from a poem written in 1382 by Geoffrey Chauser. Parlement of Foules was written to honor the first anniversary of the engagement of King Richard II of England to Anne of Bohemia and not really about mating birds. In more modern English line 309-310 would be
“For this was Saint Valentine’s Day, when every bird cometh there to choose his mate.”
After quite some digging around, the only conclusions seems to be that no one really knows. Without big parades and serious speeches, this day is for you and your loved one to do something special—so just enjoy it your way but don’t forget: it’s better to be seen than sorry!
Our first order for the year, submitted when 2015 was just a couple of minutes old, was for shamrocks, ladybugs and stars. We take that as a sign that this will be a lucky and stellar year and wish you the same.
Happy New Year!
The funflector team
Wishing you a happy and safe 2015 – the funflector team
Walter Bärthel, 1914
One hundred years ago, my grandfather Walter Bärthel was on the western front, fighting for his homeland, Germany. During his time both in the trenches and behind the front lines, he kept writing and drawing in his diary. He was only 17 years old, just a boy and had not yet completed high school, when he was caught up in the euphoria and propaganda, and joined the army. Those four diaries are an amazing story about his experiences and thoughts from the front and later from his hospital bed. On December 19th, 2014, Walter sketched the landscape near Arras in France covered in barbed wire. Arras, France, December 19th, 2014 by my grandfather Walter Bärthel.
There has been a lot of talk in the media lately about the Christmas truce of 1914, when soldiers on both sides sang Christmas songs together and maybe played soccer. On December 24th, 2014, my grandfather wrote the following:
“Donnerstag, 24. Dez.
Heiliger Abend! Abends und nachts sangen Leute von uns auf Horchposten (Weihnachtslieder), daß es die Franzosen hörten! Nach einiger Zeit sang ein Franzose. Während jedes Gesanges war alles still. Danach fingen die Horchposten wieder zu schießen an. – Ich hatte einen kleinen Weihnachtsbaum in meiner Höhle, mit Lichtern, Nüssen, den die Eltern geschickt hatten. Auch mein Kamerad besaß einen solchen. – Wie werden die Eltern zu Hause das Weihnachtsfest feiern?” Thursday, Dec. 24th Holy Night! Evening and night, our people on “listening post” sang Christmas carols, so the French could hear it! After a while, a Frenchman sang too. During each song everything was quiet. Afterwards, the “listening post” went back to shooting. I had a small Christmas tree in my dugout, with lights and nuts, which my parents had sent me. My friend also had one like it. – How will the parents celebrate Christmas back home?Translation by Personal Past.
Walter’s story is one of four in the German-French graphic novel “Tagebuch 14-18 – Vier Geschichten aus Deutschland und Frankreich” / “Carnets 14-18 – Quatre histoires de France et d’Allemagne” (“Diary 14-18 – Four stories from Germany and France“)
American folk singer John McCutcheon captured a similar story in “Christmas in the Trenches“.
For a long time, we’ve been fascinated with creativity. What is it? How can we get better at “being creative”? How do we encourage and inspire others to explore their creativity – employees, kids and others? Is creativity something you are born with or can you learn it?
The Vision Zero Initiative is not about nothing. On visionzeroinitiative.com we can learn that it is in fact a fundamental principle that requires ambitious work on infrastructure and attitudes:
“The Vision Zero is the Swedish approach to road safety thinking. It can be summarised in one sentence: No loss of life is acceptable. The Vision Zero approach has proven highly successful. It is based on the simple fact that we are human and make mistakes. The road system needs to keep us moving. But it must also be designed to protect us at every turn.”
Vision Zero was initiated by a decision of the Swedish parliament in 1997 and I saw firsthand how road safety improved in Sweden until I moved to the US ten years later. It was a bit of a shock to come here and experience the car-centric culture reflected in both citizen behavior/attitudes and infrastructure decisions. I’m happy to see that the Vision Zero has attracted a lot of attention and several American cities are adopting it to improve safety for pedestrians, bicyclists and drivers. Just a week ago, the first-ever Vision Zero for Cities Symposium (VZCS) took place in New York City – yay! There are a lot of needed improvements in infrastructure, but also in shifting attitudes among the general public. …
How much do reflectors, like the funflector® ones, actually help? The sad truth is that there are no solid numbers available. As far as we know, no one is collecting data on whether or not pedestrians who were hit by cars in the dark, had reflectors or not. However, reflectors have been promoted in Sweden since the 70’s. Insurance companies have given away hundreds of thousands of them over the years, so one has to assume that they do some good and that the repeated giveaways are based on rational business decisions to improve their bottom line. What we have though, are some numbers that we can compare between Sweden and the US, one country where 30-50% of adults wear reflectors and one where very few do. In each country, infrastructure and culture is the same day and night. Sweden has better street lights, but they are rarely enough to make a significant difference to seeing pedestrians several hundred feet away.
So, here are the numbers (pretty rough, but give the order of magnitude): …
Happy Halloween from the funflector team
Even if you don’t have kids going trick-or-treating, remember to drive carefully if you are out on the roads tonight and please remind others to do the same!
End of Daylight Savings Time Means More Dark Hours in the Afternoon
Daylight saving time ends on the night between Saturday and Sunday this weekend and we get an extra hour to sleep – or party! Don’t forget to set your clocks back an hour! Going back to “normal time” also means another hour of darkness in the late afternoon. Be careful and wear your reflectors when you are out and about! Check out this blog post by TinLizzieRidesAgain for more ideas about reflective fashion!
Take a quick deep breath and start your Holiday Shopping!
As soon as Halloween is over, the Holiday shopping season will sneak up on us. Without even having time to catch our breath, our first Holiday show is already tomorrow (Nov 1st) in Gurnee, IL. Admittedly a bit early, but it’s a great craft show with lots of unique handcrafted items. If you are in the area, come and find gifts for your friends and family and support the Warren Township High School Band Booster at their 20th Annual Craft Fair! Location: 34090 Almond Rd. Gurnee, Hours: 9AM to 3PM.
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As a kid, I loved Astrid Lindgren’s books. Not so much Pippi Longstocking and her early series, but her grand fairy tales “The Brothers Lionheart“, “Mio, My Son” and “Ronja the Robber’s Daughter“. They are set in times of snow white messenger pigeons, black tyrants with evil dragons and plundering robbers who could have been Robin Hood’s distant cousins. Although set in a fairy tale time and landscape, they are universal and time-less, covering all human traits like good and evil, brave and cowardly, humorous and serious and love and hate. The kids in them experience horrible things but learn to overcome their fears to do what is necessary to save the world from evil and eternal darkness. “Then Jonathan said there were things you have to do, even if they are dangerous. ‘Otherwise you aren’t a human being, but just a bit if filth.’ ” – from “The Brothers Lionheart”
