Contest to Design a Secular Card and Ornament!

HumanLight is an alternative celebration for Humanists during the winter season. In anticipation of this year’s festivities, the HumanLight Committee is throwing a contest:

The HumanLight Committee is hosting a HumanLight Holiday card and ornament design contest for secularists of all ages. Contestants should design an artistic expression to positively address these questions or some aspect of the HumanLight holiday.

What do we have to celebrate during the winter holiday season?

What do you hope for in the future?

What’s the Humanist view/perspective?

ELIGIBILITY: All are welcome to enter!

Category 1: Ages 11 and under.
Category 2: Ages 12-17.
Category 3: Ages 18 and up.

One entry per artist. All media, (painting, printmaking, collage, digital art, photography, or perhaps something even more creative?) is accepted.

TO APPLY: Email the image as a high resolution (at least 300 dpi) JPEG
to humanlightcontest@gmail.com. In the body of the email, include the artist’s name, age, what country and state (if it applies) he or she is from, and what method he or she used to create the image.

DEADLINE for entries is November 1, 2008.

Judge: Martha Knox is a fine artist, Humanist celebrant, art teacher, and Director of the Humanist Association of Greater Philadelphia.

Prizes: Three images will be selected, 1 from each age category. Cards and ornaments displaying all three winners will be available for purchase at the HumanLight merchandise webpage. Each prize winner will receive an ornament and set of cards with their image, as well as some HumanLight candy! The winners and their designs will also be featured on the main HumanLight website http://www.humanlight.org.

If you win, you better send me a solstice card!

1stmakearoux

I received an Xmas card from Dick Cheney. It read:

“Times are tough, times are hard.
Here’s your fuckin’ Christmas card.”
David D.G.

Personally, I think it would be hard to top this image, which I first started seeing last December:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithproctor/2286302663/

However, this one (which I found just now while looking for the URL for that one) isn’t bad either:

http://subwayfox.net/index.php?q=node/330

~David D.G.
Katie

Maybe it’s finally time I gave HumanLight a try; I’ve been celebrating the extremely general Winter Holiday for far too long.

(By this, I mean that omni-holiday where you wander around in a daze throughout December and say “Happy Holidays!” to people, and possibly exchange gifts.)

I really like Generic Winter Holiday in terms of some of its festivities. Why? Lights are pretty. Pine trees smell nice… but it has some drawbacks, like hearing White Christmas for the nine millionth time triggering a murderous rampage.

Anyway, I’m loving this back-to-our-roots atmosphere that is brewing in our culture today. Green ideas are ripening into fierce autumnal hues with all the vibrancy of signal flares. African motifs are etching themselves into the zeitgeist from every direction as the cradle of civilization finally takes its first steps out of the stone age…

Maybe I’m too optimistic for my own good, but I think something is stirring in the deep recesses of the global subconscious that screams for humanity to become a positive force, and I think celebratory life stances like Humanism would form the backbone of a much better world than most of us would admit to imagining today.
Nick

Interesting contest, might think about entering.

However, I would like to point something out. Yes, Christmas is a Christian holiday in general, and I think that it’s important to keep all religious holidays out of the realm of the public sphere (i.e. schools, malls, the like…). But, that does not mean that we shouldn’t celebrate the holiday as a cultural one with our families and friends. I’m not a Christian, but I celebrate it in a cultural sense. In that way, I don’t fully agree that those of us who are non-religious should bother with coming up with ways to celebrate the ‘winter holiday’. Maybe it has to do with early experiences…, in my childhood, the most religious my family got was setting up a scene of Jesus’ birth in the manger during Christmas (and we didn’t talk about the Bible or anything like that). It was strictly cultural, and isn’t that what Christmas is all about? Now a days anyway.
SarahH

I don’t mind cultural Christian Christmas, so long as it’s strictly cultural (which I know many are), but I like diversity, so a humanist holiday strikes me as a nice idea as well.

I love the axial tilt images and don’t think I could beat their cleverness, but I do think that any image evoking the beauty of life would work equally well. I like the axial tilt images more the more I think about them though, because the earth itself is kind of the largest thing you can draw that represents life (I mean, all the life we know exists is on it!) and the joke incorporates scientific knowledge, which has helped humanity in so many ways.
Freak

Nobody’s mentioned http://www.agnostica.com ?
Marf

Hi. I’m one of the people promoting the contest (I’m the artist judging – so if you want to win, send me some cool stuff. Or better yet, cash money 😉 Anyway, I just wanted to say that HumanLight is not meant to replace other holiday celebrations. I myself celebrate Winter Solstice as a celebration of nature, Kwanzaa, and secular Christmas with my Christian family. The more the merrier.

Or you can be like my husband and ba humbug all December holidays. 🙂