Christmas Gifts Research Articles

Intangible Heritage and Its Associative Objects as Exemplified by the Materiality of the Portable Material Culture of German Christmas Markets

Many aspects of intangible cultural heritage have associated objects of material culture that augment or enable aspects of intangible heritage to be exercised or emphasized. Christmas markets have been publicized as the quintessential event in Germany leading up to Christmas, with the over 2000 locations attracting large numbers of local, domestic, and international visitors. From their origins as mercantile venues during the medieval period, Christmas markets have evolved into multisensory social and experiential events, where the acquisition of Christmas decorations or gifts has been supplanted by the consumption of mulled wine in a social setting. Christmas markets represent intangible cultural heritage staged in ephemeral surroundings. While the abundance of material culture in Christmas markets is widely understood, this focuses on the objects offered for sale at the markets, rather than the objects that characterize a Christmas market and enable its functioning. This paper provides the first comprehensive assessment of the portable material culture associated with the German Christmas markets, covering objects as diverse as payment tokens, lapel pins, special postmarks, beer mats, and commemorative cups issued for the consumption of mulled wine. These objects, as well as numerous other manifestations of material culture, are discussed in the wider framing of the materiality of the markets, examining their ontological qualities within the multiple spheres in which these objects attain meaning (i.e., personal, event, social, and public spheres). It demonstrates that the wide range of alienable material culture associated with German Christmas markets has different manifestations of materiality, depending on the viewpoint of the user (i.e., participant, vendor, organizer), and these manifestations have different expressions of representativeness. On this foundation, this paper examines the various groups of portable and alienable material culture and discusses them in terms of their authenticity and to what extent these are representative of German Christmas markets. While all items have a connection with Christmas markets and function as symbolic shorthand souvenirs, commemorative cups issued for the consumption of hot drinks as well as the deposit tokens associated with these are both genuine and authentic and are also representative of the conceptual, social, and experiential dimensions of the event.

Sparrow's Nest Feeds Body & Spirit of Cancer Patients & Families

Sparrow's Nest Feeds Body & Spirit of Cancer Patients & Families

Price Prediction of Seasonal Items Using Time Series Analysis

The price prediction task is a well-studied problem due to its impact on the business domain. There are several research studies that have been conducted to predict the future price of items by capturing the patterns of price change, but there is very limited work to study the price prediction of seasonal goods (e.g., Christmas gifts). Seasonal items’ prices have different patterns than normal items; this can be linked to the offers and discounted prices of seasonal items. This lack of research studies motivates the current work to investigate the problem of seasonal items’ prices as a time series task. We proposed utilizing two different approaches to address this problem, namely, 1) machine learning (ML)-based models and 2) deep learning (DL)-based models. Thus, this research tuned a set of well-known predictive models on a real-life dataset. Those models are ensemble learning-based models, random forest, Ridge, Lasso, and Linear regression. Moreover, two new DL architectures based on gated recurrent unit (GRU) and long short-term memory (LSTM) models are proposed. Then, the performance of the utilized ensemble learning and classic ML models are compared against the proposed two DL architectures on different accuracy metrics, where the evaluation includes both numerical and visual comparisons of the examined models. The obtained results show that the ensemble learning models outperformed the classic machine learning-based models (e.g., linear regression and random forest) and the DL-based models.

Price Prediction of Seasonal Items Using Machine Learning and Statistical Methods

Price prediction of goods is a vital point of research due to how common e-commerce platforms are. There are several efforts conducted to forecast the price of items using classic machine learning algorithms and statistical models. These models can predict prices of various financial instruments, e.g., gold, oil, cryptocurrencies, stocks, and second-hand items. Despite these efforts, the literature has no model for predicting the prices of seasonal goods (e.g., Christmas gifts). In this context, we framed the task of seasonal goods price prediction as a regression problem. First, we utilized a real online trailer dataset of Christmas gifts and then we proposed several machine learning-based models and one statistical-based model to predict the prices of these seasonal products. Second, we utilized a real-life dataset of Christmas gifts for the prediction task. Then, we proposed support vector regressor (SVR), linear regression, random forest, and ridge models as machine learning models for price prediction. Next, we proposed an autoregressive-integrated-moving-average (ARIMA) model for the same purpose as a statistical-based model. Finally, we evaluated the performance of the proposed models; the comparison shows that the best performing model was the random forest model, followed by the ARIMA model.

Christmas Gifts Exchange between Parents and Children as a Nonverbal Means of Communicating Care

The article focuses on the Christmas gifts that parents give to their children and afterwards – that the grown-up children in turn give to their parents and their own kids, as remembered and described by the informants in the course of unstructured interviews. The subject of analysis comprises memories and narratives of the respondents, including a description of personal experience by the author. The choice of the Christmas is anything but accidental, since this period is characterized as the most intense gift-giving time, according to various opinion polls both in Lithuania and in other countries. Studies of everyday practices applied in the phenomenological anthropology allow viewing this popular practice through personal narratives. Analysis of the individual experience stories reveals modes of establishing special relationship between the gift giver and the receiver against the background of the season’s holidays. Sleep is noted to be an important element in the process of creating this relationship, since sleep is a form of existential death, which in a way guarantees longevity of the social bonds. In the course of years, when individual ceases to be a child in relation to people around him/her, and becomes a grown-up instead, an inversion of roles between the giver and the receiver takes place, which, however, is asymmetrical: the obligation to repay the received gifts directs the gift giving intention towards the future generations. The study reveals yet another aspect of these interactions: namely, the gift, as a nonverbal means of communication, enables mutual understanding between family members that is reached without any words, just by an experienced knowledge, which is defined as a lived experience in phenomenology.

It’s Time to Stop Reinventing the Wheel; Let’s Connect Those Dots Instead

A constant question I see come up for anything related to scholarly publishing—or really anything related to life in general—is: “How do I get started?” And now that I have entered the “halftime” of my life, as my husband so lovingly calls it, I see the hardest part of really any project is just figuring out how to get going. (Side note: Jonathan Schultz, our beloved Editor-in-Chief, is nodding his head knowingly as he reads this wee-bit-late column that I promised him would be early this month. We are all guilty of not knowing where to start.) Publishing used to be so much simpler. I copyedited an article and saved it on a floppy disk. I marked up paper page proofs with my purple editing pen using old school copyediting marks. I had a pica ruler and a hardcover dictionary along with paper style guides. I even used to hand code articles with XML for overtime. I will always love those overtime opportunities both for the XML knowledge and the Christmas gifts they bought my kids. Articles were published and then largely forgotten as we moved on to the next ones. Glossy journals piled up in stacks and collected dust as the same cycle repeated itself again and again. Thank you for indulging my walk down memory lane, but I am here to tell you that the way we do things today is so much better. Looking back, I think of all of those amazing articles that readers missed out […]

Joseph R. Bertino: In Memoriam (1930–2021)

Joseph R. Bertino: In Memoriam (1930–2021)

Positively Monstrous!

Positively Monstrous!

From Books to the Information Superhighway: Young People's Reading Habits and Internet Use in Iceland

In mid January 1997 a telephone survey was canied out on a random sample of 800 Icelandic children ages 10, 12,14 and 16 years of age, 100 girls and 100 boys in each age group. The response rate was 88.5%. The purpose was to examine some factors related to publications for children in the Icelandic language, including books as Christmas gifts, reading habits and Internet use. The majority of children in all age groups received books as Christmas gifts, mostly new publications. Reading is a common pastime among children, mostly among the younger groups. Girls read more than boys in all age groups. CDs are more common than bootes as presents among the 14- and 16-year-olds, but computer games are rare, particulary among girls. The Internet is used more by boys than girls in all age groups but use patterns vary as well as choice of access points.
 The author emphasizes the need to use the Internet systematically as a tool in cultural preservation.

Attitudes Based on Feelings: Fixed or Fleeting?

Researchers and practitioners want to create opinions that stick. Yet whereas some opinions stay fixed, others are as fleeting as the time it takes to report them. In seven longitudinal studies with more than 20,000 individuals, we found that attitudes based more on emotion are relatively fixed. Whether participants evaluated brand-new Christmas gifts or one of 40 brands, the more emotional their opinion, the less it changed over time, particularly if it was positive. In a word-of-mouth linguistic analysis of 75,000 real-world online reviews, we found that the more emotional consumers are in their first review, the more that attitude persists when they express it again even years later. Finally, more emotion-evoking persuasive messages create attitudes that decay less over time, further establishing emotion’s causal effect. These effects persist above and beyond other attitude-strength attributes. Interestingly, we also found that lay individuals generally fail to appreciate the relation between emotionality and attitude stability.

Eliciting time preferences when income and consumption vary: Theory, validation & application to job search

We propose a simple method for eliciting individual time preferences without estimating utility functions even in settings where background consumption changes over time. It relies on lottery tickets with high rewards. In a standard intertemporal choice model high rewards decouple lottery choices from variation in background consumption. We validate our elicitation method experimentally on two student samples: one asked in December when their current budget is reduced by extraordinary expenditures for Christmas gifts; the other asked in February when no such extra constraints exist. We illustrate an application of our method with unemployed job seekers which naturally have income/consumption variation.

Eliciting Time Preferences When Income and Consumption Vary: Theory, Validation & Application to Job Search

We propose a simple method for eliciting individual time preferences without estimating utility functions even in settings where background consumption changes over time. It relies on lottery tickets with high rewards. In a standard intertemporal choice model high rewards decouple lottery choices from variation in background consumption. We validate our elicitation method experimentally on two student samples: one asked in December when their current budget is reduced by extraordinary expenditures for Christmas gifts; the other asked in February when no such extra constraints exist. We illustrate an application of our method with unemployed job seekers which naturally have income/consumption variation.

Can cargo drones solve air freight's logjams? A drone startup says its big vertical-takeoff flier would be quick to land, load, and take off again

Ground crews remove cargo from the MD-11 and get the many packages into delivery trucks and small planes as quickly as possible before the start of the morning rush of cargo from Amazon, Walmart, and other online retailers scrambling to deliver Christmas gifts. Meanwhile, construction is snarling traffic on the I-10 freeway into Los Angeles, and because of the fog, the I-15 is no better. Similar messes are often seen at choke points throughout the world, where the package-delivery business faces a raft of problems.

A faster cryptographer's Conspiracy Santa

In Conspiracy Santa, a variant of Secret Santa, a group of people offer each other Christmas gifts, where each member of the group receives a gift from the other members of the group. To that end, the members of the group form conspiracies, to decide on appropriate gifts, and usually divide the cost of each gift among all participants of that conspiracy. This requires to settle the shared expenses per conspiracy, so Conspiracy Santa can actually be seen as an aggregation of several shared expenses problems.First, we show that the problem of finding a minimal number of transaction when settling shared expenses is NP-complete. Still, there exist good greedy approximations. Second, we present a greedy distributed secure solution to Conspiracy Santa. This solution allows a group of n people to share the expenses for the gifts in such a way that no participant learns the price of his gift, but at the same time notably reduces the number of transactions to 2⋅n+1 with respect to a naïve aggregation of n⋅(n−2). Furthermore, our solution does not require a trusted third party, and can either be implemented physically (the participants are in the same room and exchange money using envelopes) or, over Internet, using a cryptocurrency.

УРОК З ПОЗАКЛАСНОГО ЧИТАННЯ ЗА НОВЕЛОЮ О.ГЕНРІ «ДАРИ ВОЛХВІВ»

The article presents the lesson plan in extracurricular reading based on the novella by O. Henry «Gifts of the Magi». Students are offered to listen a summary of the author's biography. O. Henry's abilities in drawing and creating helped him later in writing short stories. His characters are ordinary people: clerks, salesmen, homeless people, and unknown artists. The experience their lives’ is described with great admiration and love. In novellas the author often corrects mistakes in heroes’ fate, comforts them and helps. During the lesson, students will learn the specifics features of the novella as a genre of literature. They will study the author’s biography while listening the teacher’s introduction, the phonogram, and watching the presentation. They are offered to take part in the performance and watch it. During which Jim and Della have a conversation about the value of Christmas gifts. This will help students to realize the great value of love and self-sacrifice. After the performance, the teacher is offered to make a discussion on the content of the novella and to consider the author's opinion and ideas. Students should answer the problematic questions raised at the beginning of the lesson. In conclusion, the lesson plan for extracurricular reading will allow students to extend their knowledge about the novella as a genre, to consider O. Henry's life and works, to show the value of human feelings. Key words: novella, genre, value, magi, Christmas

"Spit Spreads Death: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19 in Philadelphia"

Reviewed by: "Spit Spreads Death: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19 in Philadelphia" Jessica Martucci "Spit Spreads Death: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19 in Philadelphia," parade and exhibit. http://muttermuseum.org/exhibitions/going-viral-behindthe-scenes-at-a-medical-museum/ On September 28, 1918, two hundred thousand Philadelphians turned out to watch a parade and buy savings bonds in support of the United States war effort. Gathered in the crowd that day were nurses, industrial workers, military personnel, seamstresses, and homemakers, but an unknown trespasser also lurked among parade-goers—influenza H1N1. Within six weeks, fourteen thousand people in the city had died in the world's deadliest pandemic to date. A special exhibit at the Mütter Museum, which began in the fall of 2019, invites visitors to learn what it was like to live in Philadelphia at the height of the outbreak. Their programming and exhibition endeavor to link visitors to the past through emotional connections forged through art and the clever use of personal narratives. In partnership with Blast Theory, a UK-based artist group known for its large, innovative, interactive public art works, the Mütter Museum kicked off their [End Page 129] influenza programming with a memorial parade 101 years after the original took place (https://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/spit-spreads-death/). The registration process for the parade invited participants to choose the name of an influenza victim to honor and remember. When the day of the event arrived, registrants received large white posters printed with their person's name and death certificate. Encouraged to arrive well in advance of the parade's start time, participants milled around, studying their death certificates and chatting with one another about these long-since forgotten flu victims. I marched in memory of Effie D. Baltian, a student nurse at Philadelphia General Hospital. She died where she had worked just a few days prior, taking care of flu patients. She was 23 years old. Click for larger view View full resolution When the memorial parade began, music, composed especially for the event, struck an eerie and somber tone as prerecorded singers solemnly chanted the names of the dead. Participants played the music for the parade on their cell [End Page 130] phones, creating a surround-sound effect throughout the march. At the parade front, a large and illuminated, white rectangular box pushed its way up Broad Street, carving a path through the heart of Center City. Behind it marched the participants, carrying the names of the dead. Every minute or so, a parade organizer would select a participant from the front and ask them to stand still while two additional glowing boxes passed by them on either side. When my turn came, I stood still and watched the lighted tunnel slip past me. I saw the backs of the "living" walking away from me. My peripheral vision obscured by the glowing boxes, I felt a fleeting moment of fear, isolation, and loneliness before slipping into the noisy crowd of my "dead" companions. Suddenly, one could imagine what it must have been like to see your neighbors and family members getting sick, to wonder if you would be next. The parade created a space where the anxiety and fear from the past felt momentarily palpable again. At the end of the route, the past faded again, giving way to stands set up to dispense contemporary information about the museum and healthcare, including flu shots. The museum exhibit begins with a video of the parade that evoked faint echoes of the participatory experience. Next, visitors encounter the first of several large and beautifully designed museum panels. Following these through the exhibit, one learns about everything from manufacturing during WWI to the reliance on vaccination as a tool of modern public health to the creation and purpose of the Spit Spreads Death parade by Blast Theory. The exhibit displays a relatively small number of objects, including (though not limited to) buttons and stickers handed out during the 1918 parade, a medical specimen of a pneumonia-infected lung, some recreations of pinewood coffins, and never-opened Christmas gifts wrapped by a flu victim. This relative sparseness offers a welcome simplicity...

Frohe ökonomische Botschaften zu Weihnachten

The Christmas economics has addressed the potential welfare loss due to the purchase of Christmas gifts. This occurs when the subjective value of the gifts is less than the cost of the gift. This approach ignores the welfare effect of the gifts on the gift-givers. In a survey among students, it was shown that gift-giving also creates value by giving pleasure to the gift-givers. This should not be ignored in the economic evaluation.

SANCTITY OF CHRISTMAS AND OPTIMISM OF NEW YEAR REFLECTED IN AN ELECTRONIC TEXTBOOK ON MUSIC

The celebration of Christmas over the centuries has involved many folk and even regional traditions that are passed away, rejected and gradually forgotten by the modern man. Now more and more the main meaning of the feast the intimate reverence for the newborn God, sacrificing himself for all of us and for his mother, the Virgin Mary has been shifted from buying and receiving interesting, impressive, spectacular Christmas gifts, from arranging a lavish dining table, from a rich Christmas revel. On the other hand sending the old and welcoming the new year is traditionally associated with the anticipation of something new and good, positive change, happiness, prosperity, fulfillment of dreams. Increasingly, these personal, intimate expectations are shifting from care, where will we welcome the New Year, what will we wear to make a stronger impression, what will we eat in the festive evening. Christmas is a religious holiday specific to the Christian faith, while New Year is celebrated in the cultures where there is a chronology. Christmas has a certain date, and the New Year for Different Cultures begins in a different season. More by this glimpse is clear, first, that the two holidays differ essentially, and second, that the commercialization of our lifestyle and thinking largely unified and increasingly unifies those, essentially many different holidays. In order to limit the manifestations of negative trends that shift the main emphasis of the holidays, making them occasions to demonstrate our own success in society, it is important to to further influence the on educating adolescents. When looking for an impact to overcome already rooted in the minds of youth attitudes, it is necessary to select tools that are modenn, that evoke confidence, that are likable, attractive to young people. Spending more and more time in front of the computer screen communicating through their phones, teenagers are increasingly accustomed to trusting the electronic way of communicating as well as searching and finding the necessary information electronically. In sync with these attitudes is the new educational tool electronic textbook. True to the notion that luxuriance, spectacularity, self assertion and egotism are unrelated and should not disturb one of the two brightest Christian feasts Christmas, I set as the aim of this study highlighting by placed in the electronic textbook tasks of the different nature of the two large following in rapid succession holidays, i.e. of the gracious intimacy, modesty and kindness of Christmas, and the glamorous splendor and catcing optimism of the New Year. In this study I review the electronic music textbook for the fourth grade of the general education school in Bulgaria of Publishing House "Prosveta". The two holidays are reflected with: 2 presentations organized as team tasks. Since teamwork contributes to creating relations of mutual assistance, to neglecting of individualistic attitudes for the sake of the success of the common cause, this kind of organization is in line with the objectives of the study. 2 photo galleries designed to support the impressionsaccumulated by the presentations with additional brightly sighted visual information. As one gets the main part of the information with which he operates, visually, the acquaintance with the exhibited photographs further enhances the impact of student presentations.

Det är saligare att investera än att ge: Entreprenörskap i Sveriges Televisions julkalender

Title: It is More Blessed to Invest than to Give. Entrepreneurship in the Swedish Television Christmas CalendarCultural representations of entrepreneurship frequently overshadow positive traits in favor of greed as a central motif, particularly in children’s culture. The Swedish Christmas calendar, broadcasted on national television, has been criticized for conveying a negative view of capitalism including a portrayal of entrepreneurs as villains. However, emphasis on profession fails to acknowledge its engagement with entrepreneurship in relation to the neoliberal version of homo economicus (the economic subject). Drawing on the writings of Michel Foucault and Gary S. Becker, the aim is to show that portrayals of entrepreneurship in the Christmas calendar evoke both positive and negative connotations. In the Dickens-inspired calendar Tjuvarnas jul (The thieves’ Christmas, 2011), the two main antagonists are the head of a department store and the captain of the thieves. Both are portrayed as void of moral judgment, aiming to accumulate capital, but unlike the captain of the thieves, the head of the department store reinvests hers. Re-investment emerges as the main dividing line between good and bad capitalist behavior. When the head of the department store stops re-investing, leaving a monetary deficit behind, the accumulated funds of the captain of the thieves secure market balance and a flourishing of professional entrepreneurship. In the calendar Kaspar i Nudådalen (Kaspar in Nudå valley, 2001), the protagonist aims to receive a maximum amount of Christmas gifts. To ensure this, he creates a measuring tool whereby he can evaluate his actions and its outcome: good actions allow him to advance a step and bad actions force him to retreat. His everyday accounting emphasizes the construction of subjectivity as a distinct homo economicus as the measuring tool begins to shape his being, disciplining his thoughts and actions. Together, the two Christmas calendars emphasize entrepreneurship as an ambivalent discourse beyond a biased negative view of capitalism in children’s culture.

Hana Kōkō: What’s Wrong with Nelson’s Māori Santa?

I was born in 1980. I grew up with Santa. He delivered gifts to our home until the day that I stopped believing and realised that my parents were behind the whole thing. They were, of course, commissioned by the jolly man himself, to procure, wrap, and hide the Christmas gifts until the Baby Jesus popped open the bubbly (or fizzy). The origins of Santa Claus are said to point to Saint Nicholas of Myra, an early Christian bishop during the time of the Roman Empire (Seal, 2006; Wheeler, 2010).