Christmas is Coming...

THIS SWAP IS NOW FULL! THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO HAS SHOWN INTEREST!

And I have an idea for a Christmas Tea Swap. I will need at least 11 participants though.

I am in an art group that does a 12 days of christmas swap every year, each participant makes 11 gifts and sends one gift to each of the other participants, and on the 12 days leading up to christmas we would open one of the gifts. (yes, I know that these are not the actual days of christmas, but it is fun to do it as a countdown) Each person was assigned a day, so on the “day” that they were assigned, we would open that person’s gift. It was a lot of fun. You can see on my art blog (which hasn’t been updated in quite some time … probably not since the 12 days of christmas exchange!) the gifts that were exchanged each day.

http://eccentricpastiche.blogspot.com/

Now … how this pertains to us? No, I don’t want us to do an art exchange. LOL I am thinking about doing a TEA exchange. Each of the participants gets a “day” and the day they are assigned, they send out 11 samplings (enough for at least 1 pot of tea – 4 cups) of tea for that day. Try to use the lyrics of the song for inspiration. For example, if you’re day 1, maybe find a favorite Pear tea for the First Day of Christmas. Of course, there is a chance to be really creative with this. For example, on Colly Birds … since they are BLACK birds, maybe choose a blackberry tea. For Lords a Leaping, maybe choose a tea that really gets you going in the morning or something that has you leaping for joy. You get the idea, right?

Interested?

I need 11 participants. No more, no less, so the first 11 that send me a private message will be signed up for the swap. I cannot guarantee which day you’ll get, I’ll be doing that via random draw… But I do want to get the days assigned as soon as possible so that it gives you time to contemplate the day and to be creative with how it pertains to the song choice.

I welcome any thoughts about this, too~

EDITED TO ADD:

PROPOSED TIMELINE – this is not a concrete timeline, but because I’ve had a couple of mentions about the timeline here is the basic “rough draft” idea of the timeline …

I announced this early so that once I have the 11 other participants I could assign a “day” for them, and they could have some time to ponder a good tea for that day. As I mentioned above, if you happen to be assigned the first day of Christmas, you could go with a pear tea. You get the idea. Some of these days are going to be a little bit less obvious so I wanted to give you some time to think of something inspiring … I don’t want someone to just say “eh… what the heck” and just choose some random tea, I’m an artist and I want a little bit of creative inspiration behind the choice you make.

So, once you have the tea in mind that you want to use, you’re going to have to procure this tea (again, not 11 different random samples from your existing stash, all 11 teas need to be the same tea, and it would be better if it’s a fresh tea … we’re all going to be drinking it) and then package it up. Your outer envelope should have the Number of the Day … for example, if you’re the first day, on the outside of the envelope you should say “Don’t open this until the First Day of Christmas” … or something like that. Then we can choose to have an element of surprise to this if we want. If you want to open all 11 packages when you get them you can, but if you want to embrace the surprise factor, you can wait until that day.

For the purposes of this exchange, the first day of christmas is December 14. I know that’s not the real “first day of christmas,” but that’s what we’re going with for this exchange. So all packages need to be received NO LATER than December 13 … so I think that all packages need to be sent out no later than November 20th since we do have a couple of Canadian swappers in this swap. That way, we can all be sure to have our envelopes when the swap starts.

OK… so that’s it. This is going to be FUN I think – and I hope you’ll sign up! I do have a couple of spots left, so if you’re interested, you do need to sign up now so you don’t get left out!