If a girl can honor Thanksgiving with a pumpkin pie challenge she should do a little somethin’ somethin’ for Earth Day. I’m grateful my Pilgrim brothers and sisters made it through the winter (and even more thankful Squanto happened to live in the burbs) but it’s difficult to compete with a planet that’s managed to strike a life supporting balance for 4.5 billion years.
So I went shopping. Because when you deeply love and honor something, you merchandise it. Consider birthdays, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, anniversaries and Administrative Professionals Day. And then there’s Christmas; we love Christmas so much we’ve sacrificed a few months of merchandise mania to it; two weeks of buying, one week of hanging, one week of wrapping and shipping, four weeks of glorious display, and another week to reconfigure all of our excessive holiday crap into oversized green storage bins.
I’m in the middle of Target and can’t find a single holiday decoration or food product dedicated to the Great Mother. Where are the little evergreen tree lights, the endangered species shaped muffin tins, the earth friendly products in a tidy recycle bin wrapped in cellophane? As I walked an aisle of half-priced stuffed bunnies and hard jellybeans it came to me; Earth Day needs an icon.
Dedicating a day to our environment was stamped on our calendar back in 1970 by Senator Nelson. If it had been a spiritual event backed by a religious organization (as much as we may wish it, Sierra Club is not a religion) I’d be purchasing fuzzy polar bears and counter top wind turbans fashioned from recycled pop cans.
What am I supposed to do on April 22? Take a walk in the woods? Marvel at the unusual ground moss that looks like a million, tiny, lime green stars bubbling out of the soil? Sit by a wild creek musing over the beauty of it all?
We’ve given Earth Day forty years to hit the shelves. Obviously, it needs a few marketing geniuses to launch it into full holiday status. And, being a full-blooded-credit-card-carrying American woman, I’ve got some great ideas. Merchandisers of America unite! I’m about to hand you the next “Mother’s Day”.
What we need is a campaign: Show Your Love for The Planet- light up every tree within twenty-four feet of an outdoor plug with green LED light strands, hang wreaths of exotic Asian savanna grasses over your hearth, display rock candy in a polished green turtle shell dish.
THIS holiday demands a dying plant centered in every living room. Since Christmas has claimed the Douglas fir I’m proposing we open a million palm lots. Palms come in every size so the apartment consumer can get their little table palm while the socialite can bask beneath her twelve footer. Think of the decorative packs we could sell: wasp hives, sea shells, shark teeth, scarlet macaw feathers, porpoise fins, freeze dried honey bees…
Food! It’s not a holiday until we reap the earth’s harvest and fashion it into cute little party appetizers. Since the turkeys, pigs, and lambs will be busy regenerating their numbers, we’ll go with the Kangaroo as the traditional meat for our Earth Day dinner. This will give the Australians a full year to slaughter, package, and ship the 5 million Roos we’re going to demand. Throw in sides of whale sushi, frog legs, plates of honeycomb drizzled in an ultra-rich cream with a penguin milk base. Okay, so this may be asking too much from the penguin population. We’ll have to supplement it with cow’s milk.
We still need an Earth Day icon. There are plastic statues to be made for the front lawn, vinyl clings to paste all over our windows, fuzzy costumes to dress our kids in for the Earth Day family picture. After some hard Google research, I’ve found an adorable creature: the Red Panda Cub. Now that’s a face I’d put on my decorative hand towels and Earth Day china. Let’s just hope they don’t go extinct before we get this campaign off the ground. Another lost creature is not the message we’re looking for.
Other Sloan Images’ Articles:
- Wall Collections :: Omaha Photographer
- Portrait Collection Ideas :: Part IV
- More Portrait Collection Ideas
- An idea for a portrait collection!
- More Portrait Collection Ideas :: Part III
- Why Hire a Professional Photographer?
by Christina
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