Tag: holidays

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Celebrating the Holidays with Open Source

The holiday season is upon us once again, and this year I decided to celebrate in an open source way. Like a particular famous holiday busybody, I have a long list (and I do intend to check it twice) of holiday tasks: create a greeting card (with addressed envelopers) to send to family and friends, make a photo montage or video to a suitably festive song, and decorate my virtual office. There are plenty of open source applications and resources making my job easier. Here’s what I use.

Inkscape and clip art

One of my favorite resources is FreeSVG.org (formerly Openclipart.org). It’s easy to find your favorite holiday, including Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year’s, and more. The clip art is all contributed by users like you and me, and Creative Commons Zero (CC0), so you don’t even need to provide attribution. When possible, I still do give attribution, to ensure that FreeSVG and its artists get visibility.

Here’s an example of some clip art from FreeSVG:

A cartoon of a brown cornucopia with red apples, an orange pumpkin, and brown nuts spilling out

Using Inkscape’s Text to Path tool, I added my own text to the image, which I used on a card. With a little more preparation, I could also use the graphic on some custom cups or placemats.

A cartoon of a brown cornucopia with red apples, an orange pumpkin, and brown nuts spilling out, with the words "We Give Thanks" in an arch over the top

Word processing

LibreOffice Writer can be used to create greeting cards and posters for use around your home or distributing to your friends and family. Create a database of your family and friends using LibreOffice Calc and then use that resource to simplify making mailing labels with the mail merge function.

Creative Commons pictures and graphics

There’s also art on search.creativecommons.org. Mind the license type: give proper credit to anything requiring attribution. This image (“Thanksgiving Dealies”) came from the Creative Commons image search. It’s by Martin Cathrae and is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, so it can be adapted, reused, and shared under the same license.

A candlelight centerpiece using pumpkin shells as flower holders for small red and yellow floral bouquets.

I took this same image and added some of my own text to it with GIMP. You can use Inkscape to do the same thing. 

A candlelight centerpiece using pumpkin shells as flower holders for small red and yellow floral bouquets, with the words "Happy Holidays" at the top left of the image

Creative Commons offers plenty of image options that would make for a festive background during your next video conference.

Videos and live streaming

You can also incorporate images like these along with some of your own and create a short video clip using OpenShot video editor. You can easily add narration by recording a separate voice track using Audacity. Sound effects can be added in Audacity, saved to file, and imported into a soundtrack on OpenShot video editor. Find legal background music to add to your video.

Livestream your holiday gatherings with Open Broadcaster Software. It’s easy to use OBS to present an engaging holiday show for your friends and family using the software, or you can save the program as a Matroska or MP4 file for later viewing.

Reading material

Project Gutenberg is an excellent source of free holiday reading material to share. Dickens’ Christmas Carol is one such resource that is easily read on the web or downloaded as an EPUB or in a format for your favorite eReader. You can also find royalty-free reading materials, like “The Feast of Lights” from Librivox, in mp3 format so they can be downloaded and played in your favorite browser or media player.

Holiday fun

The most important aspect of the holiday season is that they’re relaxing and fun times with friends and family. If you’ve got family members curious about computers, take a moment to share some of your favorite open source resources with them.

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Giving with intention

The holidays are upon us for another year and with that comes the need for many folks to purchase and ship gifts to friends and family around the region or world. In previous years I’ve sent Amazon gift cards, money or sometimes gifts that I thought had meaning at least for me to the person(s) on my gift list. Some on my list have food allergies. Giving a fruit cake or even cookies to a person who’s gluten sensitive or has some other allergy is not a good idea. Earlier this fall I received a gift from a person who had made a donation in our names to a historical foundation. That invited me to begin to explore what other possibilities there were and in the process I found two new B-Corporations who have great gifts that demonstrate care for the recipient but at the same time are good for the planet.

Who Gives A Crap is one corporation that caught my eye. They sell toilet paper, paper towels and more. Some of their items are made from bamboo and others are made from recycled paper. They learned that 2.4 billion folks didn’t have access to a toilet in 2012. That number has decreased in part due to their efforts. They delivered their first product in 2013 and they have been going strong ever since. They donate 50% of their profits to build toilets and improve sanitation in the developing world.

Another eye catcher is Lula’s Garden. Their specialty is selling small succulent gardens. The business was born out of a love of succulents and a belief that a gift should serve a higher purpose. That grabbed my attention because that is exactly what I wanted to do this year. Gift giving ought to be something that impacts the recipients wellness throughout the year. They believe that better gift giving encourages better living. There will at least a couple of folks on my list who will get a succulent garden this year. Each garden sold provides six months of safe drinking water for someone in the developing world.

One of my favorite B-corps is Greyston Bakery. They make brownies for Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. Besides making the best brownies I have ever eaten they create job opportunities for folks who are traditionally discriminated against in the labor market. I’ve sent many brownies to friends and relatives in the years since I first learned of Greyston.

Finally, for the folks on my gift list who can eat, bread, peanut butter, biscotti and more I recommend Monks Bread which I eat nearly every day for lunch. Trappist monks at Abbey of the Genesee have been making delicious bread since 1951. They’ve diversified their baked goods in recent years to include biscotti and cheese crisps. You can also purchase products from other Trappist communities whose items they also sell in their online store.