July/August 2008
REsources For Living
BY LYNN UNGAR, MINISTER FOR LIFESPAN LEARNING, CHURCH OF THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP
 It’s amazing the stuff you find once you start poking around the Web. In researching stuff to post on the KidTalk web page for kids, parents and religious educators, I’ve learned cool facts about folks from UU history (Did you know that Henry Bergh, the founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was a Unitarian?), and I’ve found out about some interesting holidays. (Did you know that Naw Ruz, the Iranian and Baha’i New Year, is celebrated by sprouting lentils and making a display of seven things starting—in Persian—with the letter “S”?)
But one of the things that I have come to realize, after going through the seasons a few times, is that there really are not a whole lot of holidays in July and August. For the Northern Hemisphere, there are a ton of fall holidays, like Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur and Labor Day. There are lots of spring holidays, like Easter, Passover and, of course, Naw Ruz. And of course the winter is chock full of holidays like Christmas, Chanukah, Yule and Divali. But summer? Not much. Not much at all. In the US there’s Independence Day, but really, the pickings are pretty slim.
 Of course, one of the things about being a Unitarian Universalist is that we tend to be take-charge kind of folks. If there’s something wrong with how the world is, we want to go out and fix it. So I say, maybe it’s time for each of us to get down to creating some holidays of our own. What holiday would you come up with for July or August? Here are a few ideas to get you started:
Fruit Salad Day
 One of the great things about summer (in those parts of the world where it is summer in July and August) is that all kinds of wonderful fruit is in season. Go with your family to a farmers market and shop around for a bunch of different kinds of fruit—nectarines and tangerines; peaches, plums, and pluots; strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and blackberries.
Bring your haul home, wash it up, cut it in bite-sized pieces, and toss it with a little yogurt or orange juice so nothing turns brown. Fruit salad is a celebration of summer. It’s also a celebration of how you can put together a bunch of different colors and flavors and textures and get something that’s even more beautiful and delicious than any one by itself. A blueberry doesn’t give up any of its blueberry-ness sitting next to a chunk of peach, but each lends something special to the other. What a tasty way to celebrate diversity!
Water Day
 All of life depends on water, and for many people in the world, because of climate change and pollution, it’s getting harder and harder to find enough water to drink, wash, and grow crops. Celebrate water day by going swimming, having a water fight outside with spray bottles (which use less water than hoses), and/or drinking ice water. And learn what you can do to save water by taking shorter showers, turning off the tap when you’re not actually using the water and planting drought-resistant plants in your garden.
Perseid Night
August 12th is the night of the year when you’re most likely to be able to see meteors (shooting stars). The Perseid meteors are dust left behind by the tail of the Swift-Tuttle comet, and when that dust falls through our Earth’s atmosphere it burns up, showing a bright line of fire across the night sky. Celebrate Perseid Night by going to a place away from city lights where you can stay up really late and watch the night sky. It’s a great night to go camping, and set a travel alarm clock to wake you up in the middle of the night. While you’re staring at the sky, waiting for a meteor to shoot by, you can look at the stars and think about how something that looks so tiny is really unimaginably huge and unimaginably far away. It’s good to get a reminder every now and again that each of us is a very tiny part of something way, WAY bigger than we are.
Ice Cream Day
 Really, don’t you think there should be a holiday for eating ice cream? Here’s the thing about ice cream. It comes in literally hundreds of different flavors. You might be a mint chip kind of person, while your best friend is chocolate all the way. Your dad might be a pumpkin ice cream fanatic, while your Aunt Lulu plans her vacations around getting to the best green tea ice cream in the world. We don’t all agree about which ice cream is best, but we know that there are oodles of different flavors, and that life is better for the fact. Doesn’t that sound kind of like Unitarian Universalism? Celebrate Ice Cream Day by having two scoops of ice cream—one that’s your tried-and-true favorite and one that you’ve never tasted before in your life.
So what summer holiday would you create? Or maybe your family has a special holiday for July or August already. Email me at lungar@clfuu.org and let me know what you celebrate and when, and I can add it to the KidTalk Web page. That way, we won’t be short on holidays after all!
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Last updated June 26, 2008
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