Greetings Blogmonauts,

Behind today's puzzling window is the mighty machinery of man (and, as you probably saw, an Imaginary Friend)

CHOO CHOO

The  artwork in Festive Finds: Happy Holidays Calendar is based on advent calendar art that we posted on our instagram last year - we're running it again on instagram now, with that same, original artwork. Each day, the first image is a door with the number on it, and folk can swipe to "open" the door and reveal an original piece of festive art by Fay. We're neither of us religious, though we do celebrate Christmas. We like decorating the house, and putting up a tree, having a big meal, and giving presents to loved ones.  And we love advent calendars, because opening doors to find a surprise is the kind of thing we dig. To us, the time we call "Christmas" is about a celebration of kindness and togetherness with family and friends. So while in these blogposts we do refer to Christmas, or describe things as Christmas-y, we didn't want to exclude anybody, so we made a point of titling the game around the "festive season" and "happy holidays" - because that's something we feel that everyone can get behind. 

The aim to be inclusive also extended to our ideation and planning for the images that would be behind each door - the problem we came up against was, when you remove overtly religious imagery from the Christmas lexicon, and you want a different image for 24 doors, there's only so many penguins and snowy scenes that spring to mind. To keep things fresh and novel, our ideation for cool seasonal artwork encompassed classic greetings card imagery from yesteryear: A great deal of which involves dated ideas of what a hi-tech toy meant - so there are lots of spinning tops, tin robots, teddy bears, nutcrackers and, of course, Happy Train!!!!!11Eleven.

The thing about trains is, they're pretty cool, especially when decked out in different colours. Anyone who's seen Thomas the Tank-Engine knows this. and thus the art for today was born. We hope you enjoyed it and that you'll join us again tomorrow for another scintillating devblog post.

'Til next time,

Imaginary Friends Games

(This sausage was made by Martyn taking dictation from Festive Fay)