December 3 Announcements
The Holbrook Student Council is holding a canned goods food drive to help the CHEFS food cupboard. Bring in your coins to donate through December 18th.
Student Council is sponsoring the annual Giving Tree this year. It will look different than normal this season. If you are interested in getting a tag with an item please send Mrs. Archambault an email. She will get a tag to you. All items will need to be returned by Thursday, December 17th.
Next Tuesday, December 8th, is picture retake day.
Gingerbread and the shapes it takes have a long history. An early form of gingerbread can be traced to the ancient Greeks and Egyptians who used it for ceremonial purposes. Gingerbread made an appearance in Europe when 11th-century Crusaders brought back ginger from the Middle East for the aristocrats' cooks to experiment with. As ginger and other spices became more affordable to the masses, gingerbread caught on.
An early European recipe for gingerbread consisted of ground almonds, stale breadcrumbs, rosewater, sugar and, naturally, ginger. The resultant paste was pressed into wooden molds. These carved works of art served as a sort of storyboard that told the news of the day, bearing the likeness of new kings, emperors, and queens, or religious symbols. The finished cookie might be decorated with edible gold paint (for those who could afford it) or flat white icing to bring out the details in relief.
In the 16th century, the English replaced the breadcrumbs with flour, and added eggs and sweeteners, resulting in a lighter product. The first gingerbread man is credited to Queen Elizabeth I, who knocked the socks off visiting dignitaries by presenting them with one baked in their own likeness. Gingerbread tied with a ribbon was popular at fairs and, when exchanged, became a token of love.
On a more practical note, before refrigeration, aromatic crumbled gingerbread was added to recipes to mask the odor of decaying meat.
The gingerbread house became popular in Germany after the Brothers Grimm published their fairy tale collection which included "Hansel and Gretel" in the 19th century. Early German settlers brought the tradition to the Americas.
Gingerbread houses never caught on in Britain as they did in North America, where some extraordinary examples can be found. But they do exist in other parts of Europe.
In December 2001, bakers in Torun, Poland, attempted to beat the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest-ever gingerbread house. It was made in Szczecin, Poland, with 4,000 loaves of brick-shaped gingerbread measuring 11 1/2 feet high. It took a week to create and used 6,000 eggs, a ton of flour, and 550 pounds of shortening. Alas, they lost to an American team.
Random Thought of the Day: I wonder what my dog named me
December 2 Announcements
Today’s Lunch: Chicken Quesadillas
The Holbrook Student Council is holding a canned goods food drive to help the CHEFS food cupboard. Bring in your coins to donate through December 18th.
Next Tuesday, December 8th, is picture retake day.
Odd Moments This Month in History - December 14, 1807: Space Invader - At 6:30 a.m. on this day in 1807, residents from Vermont to Connecticut looked up at the sky and saw a red fireball. About two-thirds the size of a full Moon, it raced across the heavens, broke apart, and fell to earth in at least six areas of Weston (now Easton), Trumbull, and Fairfield, Connecticut. Whizzing sounds were heard close to the impact sites, and three sonic booms were heard as far as 40 miles away. The entire event took about 30 seconds.
Upon hearing the news a few days later, Yale professor Benjamin Silliman, accompanied by his colleague, professor James Kingsley, traveled to the impact area to talk to witnesses, examine impact sites, and collect specimens (including some that enterprising townsfolk were selling as souvenirs). Silliman confirmed that it had been a meteorite—the first officially recorded in the New World.
Meteorites, rocks that fell from space, were a concept slowly gaining acceptance in Europe, but their study was still a relatively new science. In an article in the Connecticut Herald published on December 29, Silliman and Kingsley described the Weston event. The news rapidly spread to other newspapers, and accounts were published in literary and philosophical journals. Later, Silliman performed a chemical analysis of the rocks and published a revised report. The findings were discussed by notable scientific organizations in Philadelphia, London, and Paris. Still, there were skeptics about the idea of meteorites, including U.S. president Thomas Jefferson, who was said to have remarked, “It is easier to believe that two Yankee professors could lie than to admit that stones could fall from heaven.”
Did You Know: Koalas share a strange similarity with humans in that we both have fingerprints. However, even stranger is the fact that it’s impossible for you to instantly tell between them. In fact, even experts struggle to separate koala fingerprints from human ones.
Random Thought of the Day: “Go to bed, you’ll feel better in the morning” is the human version of, “Did you turn it off and back on again?”
November 30 Announcements
Our new Mask Rules are that masks are on inside the building at all times (unless it is lunch or snack). Your teachers will go over this with you.
You all know him, his name is Waldo and we’re always looking for him. This is the history of Where’s Wally (known in the US and Canada as Where’s Waldo).
The iconic, elusive man in the red-and-white striped shirt was first hidden away in 1987 by British illustrator Martin Handford.
Handford started working as a freelance illustrator, drawing crowd scenes for a variety of magazines and advertising companies. He got the idea for a whole book made up of crowd scenes and approached a publishing company about it in 1986. The art director suggested that he make a character to act as a focal point in his pictures of crowds to encourage people to look at the picture more closely.
After a bit of thought, Handford came up with the distinctive Wally/Waldo character. The round glasses and pom-pom on top of Wally’s head were definitive of Wally’s personality, which Handford described as something like a “train spotter”—a phrase used in England in the 1980s to describe someone who was a bit daft.
Handford soon started designing the two-page spreads that would make up the first Where’s Wally? book. It took him as many as eight weeks to finish each picture, which were filled with various other characters doing a myriad of entertaining things. Some of the spreads contain upwards of 3,000 to 4,000 tiny figures, which understandably take some time to create—not to mention the crazy backgrounds, which include everything from a cake factory to a band competition.
The books have since been widely published throughout the world in nineteen different languages to date. Wally’s name is often changed for these different editions. For instance, he’s “Waldo” in the US and Canada, “Charlie” in France, “Walter” in Germany, “Ali” in Turkey, “Efi” in Israel, and “Willy” in Norway. All total, the books have sold well over 50 million copies and are still going strong. Not bad for what essentially are just books of drawings of a bunch of crowds in various settings.
Random Thought of the Day: Clapping hands is all about hitting yourself when you like something.
