Lolita Advent Calendar

Before you get super excited: no, no-one has come up with an actual advent calendar for lolitas, as far as I’m aware. Though, of course, with a little bit of thought and effort, you could make one for a friend, the ‘make your own’ advent calendar trend still seems to be going quite strong.

Instead, this quick post is for all of you out there looking for ideas to spread festive cheer to your local communities. This is something that I will be doing for my comm and thought that the idea is good enough to share. Because let’s face it, for the majority of us Christmas meetups are still not an option beyond Zoom, which is enough to bring even the most cheerful person down.

To keep my comm sufficiently festive and to make up for the lack of fancy meetups, I decided to run an advent calendar-style quiz. Every day until Christmas itself I will post a question in our group. They will all be somehow Christmas-related, some will also be about lolita fashion or our community, but I’m also including some general knowledge questions, some with visual clues to guess the song etc. The first person to answer correctly will receive 20 points, the second one 10 points, and the third one - 5 points. So because the points are awarded primarily on speed (as well as being right), the questions themselves will be on the simpler side. Together with the range of topics, this should give everyone at least a chance at guessing.

If you have the energy and your comm is large, by all means think of ways to make this into a team challenge. Goths vs Sweets?

This in itself is enough to make for a fun game. I remember last year my office had an advent calendar filled with cheesy Christmas riddles, and even though they were very cheesy, everyone was excited for riddle time each day. It provided a short break from work, got everyone together for those few minutes, and kept the festive spirit going. So if creating and scheduling an advent calendar-style quiz is the only work you can commit to, I’m sure your comm will appreciate it. And if your comm uses Facebook as its main platform, this should be easy to set up in advance with scheduled posts, making the workload a little bit lesser for you.

However, I have decided to take this one step further. Partly because I feel like a quiz like this could easily end up favouring people who are good at quizzes and/or free at the right time to be quick enough to answer first - and partly because I just wanted to get everyone more involved. To supplement that, on each weekend there will be challenges in addition to the quiz questions. Everyone who completes the challenge will receive 10 points, giving people a chance to catch up and make a difference in the overall leaderboard. These will also range, though remaining within things that are doable. An obvious one is to attend the Winter ILD online meetup, which I also plan on hosting, but other challenges involve making themed coords or taking a selfie with a specified object. For some of the challenges, where there is room for taking it to the next level, there are also 5 bonus points to be awarded, to encourage creativity and effort.

Taking certain kinds of selfies is the easiest challenge to come up with, but don't stop there. You can get your comm to write themed haiku poems, draw things, donate money to charities - the sky is your limit.

I considered what could be the prize, but as times are rather tough for everyone, and Christmas season can be a drain on people’s wallets even on a good year, I decided not to give any actual prize that people might unironically want. But since it’d be hugely unfair to not let the efforts go unrecognised, since the maximum possible is 550 points, I felt I had to create something. So in the spirit of “what would we do in primary school”, the prize that I created is a tacky diploma made in Microsoft Word - the kind that when people were first learning Word, every school would make. Think all the cringe: Comic Sans font, themed colourful border, ClipArt images, Word Art, all that early-to-mid-2000s goodness that screams “graphic design is my passion”. It’s essentially a prize so uncool that it becomes desirable because of it. Worthless, yet still there to encourage participation. Leeds comm also has some history of wanting useless, ugly tat, at several raffles in the past we’ve had some charity shop gem be a prize and people wishing that they would win it just because it was so ridiculous, so a cringey Microsoft Word diploma is exactly the sort of prize that people would enjoy.

Of course, some comms have people willing to donate things. Or creative people able to make something. Or the mods know that the next ticketed event will be possible to host, so they could offer a small discount on the ticket. But I’m sharing what my intended prize is precisely so that those of you reading this who really can’t offer anything of value don’t feel the pressure to. You don’t have to have a prize at all, if you decide to do it. Lolitas are starved of interaction and fun things to distract them from the pandemic dread, so knowing that there is something to look forward to every day will likely be encouragement enough. But if you really want to offer something - think about the most uncool thing possible that you could offer, put a Christmas spin on it and go with that. For the lulz.

Sadly, Word 2010 doesn't have those ultra cringy Word Art styles. Remember the wavy rainbow one? But at least the tacky frames are still there.

We're only just halfway through November, so if this idea appealed to you, hopefully you still have enough time to make something to share with your comm. And if you do, by all means let me know how it went! I’ve never done anything like this, so as of now I’m not yet sure how my comm will react. But I have every faith that they will get in the spirit of things and good fun will be had. Which is all that I want from this.