In 2008, the department began a new tradition of decorating our office doors with winter holiday themes.
Following last year's tradition, our door decoration began with paper cut-outs of a reindeer lighting a menorah (with the flames being elf heads). This idea, referred to as "Mr. Reindeer Shamas" after the reindeer, was suggested by Joanna (one of my officemates this year) after I asked for door decoration ideas. A picture of my implementation of her idea can be found below.
Meanwhile, my other officemate (Wenting) and I were working on our own ideas for the door decoration. Wenting wanted to recognize the Chinese New Year with the Chinese zodiac. I wanted to have a community-theme for my door decoration. I eventually settled on winter holidays from "around the world" (well, just those parts that faculty, staff, and grad students came from).
For the days leading up to the judging, Wenting drew most of the Chinese zodiac. Instead of drawing the tiger, she brought in her stuffed tiger from China. The rabbit was a picture of a pet rabbit I'm taking care of. The rooster was a picture of my white chicken. Since the coming year is the year of the tiger, Wenting's tiger appears at the top. Hanging down from the perch he is sitting on is an circle with the Chinese character for tiger, the English word "tiger", and the coming year: 2010. A picture of Wenting's part of the door can be seen below.
She also drew a Chinese symbol for luck, turned it upside-down (turning something upside-down means whatever it represented is coming, so the symbol upside-down meant that luck is coming), and put it above our office number. Here is a picture of it:
The morning of the judging, I removed Mr. Reindeer Shamas from the front of the door and placed it on the back of the door, replacing it with a map of the world (provided by my wonderful advisor!). The basic idea was to find people in the department who come from different countries, find what winter holidays are celebrated in those countries, then put pictures of the people and short descriptions of the holidays on the door. I then linked the people (and holidays) to their country (or city, in the case of Americans) of origin. Below is a picture of my part of the door.
We integrated the two ideas by saying that the major holiday celebrated in China is the Spring Festival (I think that's the same as the Chinese New Year). There are pictures of about a dozen Chinese faculty and grad students.
Here is a picture of the entire door:
and a picture of my officemates, the door, and me:
Again, following last year's tradition, our door won first place! We received free food from Chipotle, which we decided to share with the rest of the ITSPOKE group. We also received $25 to donate to the charity of our choice; we gave it to the local food bank (because grad students love free food!).
Finally, in the tradition of always mentioning the creator of the competition, Ryan Moore, his rabbit is the one used in Wenting's Chinese zodiac. He was not pleased to know that his bunny helped our door win.
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