[ A Crayola-branded cardboard box is filled with little packets of brown paper. They’re all stamped with a smiling-faced sun, many of them are closed with washi tape in a variety of colors, and they’re all numbered in dark red ink. ]
One of the many discord servers I’ve joined since the onset of the plague — the first one, in fact — is called Gnome Space, & the fine people I’ve met there have done a lot to get me through the last several years.
Of course, any grouping of highly intelligent, VERY strange people will eventually start producing lore, & the gnomes are no different; St. Cod exists, as does the Fish Butt, & of course the Space Whales carry your packages.
& there are a LOT of packages, because we gnomes send each other a LOT of stuff. There’s a traveling perfume box, another for gaming stuff, & yes, a traveling box solely for exchanging googly eyes.
… we’re like this.
We also do gift exchanges several times a year, centered around solstices, or equinoxes, sometimes the lunar new year, occasionally around holidays we’ve adopted or made up for ourselves.
This year we’re doing Gnome Yule Advent, which involves sending a gnome twelve wrapped presents, & receiving twelve wrapped presents from another gnome. They’re to be opened beginning on Yule itself, or perhaps Christmas, or on the first of December; or twelve days before Yule or Christmas or Festivus, or intermittently through December when you’re having a bad day — anyway, the rules are very strict in stating that one may make one’s own rules.
Above is the box I sent out a couple weeks ago, which will, I hope, bring great cheer to someone who is very dear to me. & I have, also, received a box, from someone I barely know, who also lives in Colorado, though about as far away from here as it’s possible to get.
I’m still not sure when I’m opening mine, but chances are good I’ll be posting about what I get.
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