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Happyzine weekly – December 7th, 09

Submitted by on December 7, 2009 – 5:10 pmNo Comment
Editor’s Comment
charlotte@happyzine.co.nz

Just in case you hadn’t noticed – it’s December.  I’m feeling the urge to transform my home into a magical, sparkling, cave full of promise and eye-candy.  And I want to do it in a New Zealand kind of way.  How are you decorating your home this year?  I’m told that it’s best to come up with a theme and stick to it.  I like it, I’m down with ‘consistency’, it’s a useful trait.  In my life there are some pagan type people who prefer to avoid all the Christmas carry-on its associated material delight.  As for me, I’m leaning towards the celebration side of Christmas… or even Solstice.  There’s no way my inner-child could deal with ignoring the 25th of December! Some, I know prefer to celebrate summer Solstice, which happens a few days before Christmas, with just as much verve and fun.  I’m putting the call out for your thoughts on how to best celebrate Christmas or Solstice or what ever else you’d like to talk about celebrating this December. Email us your thoughts. I’d love to share them with our good-news community.

Enjoy your week,


Charlotte Squire
www.happyzine.co.nz

Good News Roundup

Let’s try this again, wishing a warm welcome to the lovely Mary Speller – our Palmerston North writer. Last week the link to her introduction didn’t work, so here it is once more and with just as much pleasure.

Fatherhood – what an important role.  New research proves that Kiwi Dads love fatherhood and want to be more involved, check out this Plunket piece on the findings.

This man’s findings will be of interest to many – one step at a time, we’re gathering 100 ways to naturally boost our immune systems for Happyzine readers. We’re up to number twenty-six and we’re very excited to share the latest six tips from Master Herbalist and maker of highly popular, organic, hand-made, natural, herbal dietary supplements – Malcolm Harker.

The lovely Hannah Campbell joins us this week with a blog called Creativity for Transformational Change. She writes about a group she attends, once a week, where women use Art Therapy techniques to delve inwards and re-connect.

Next, one of New Zealand’s most popular Maori Bloggers -  Marty Mars – is very impressed with Te Papa, who are staging the second largest international repatriation of Maori human remains.  He also has plenty of positive words to say about an international movement to save and protect the Sacred Grounds of our planet; and finally, he comments on Dame Judith Binney’s support for Maori tribe Tuhoe‘s call for renewed self-determination, within their own land boundaries.

Last week we drew your attention to NZ’s most successful complimentary currency – HANDS – this week, take a look at another way of trading energy – Work Now.  It’s a Time Trade Marketplace.

We’re closing with positive environmental news, have you heard of ‘No Impact Man‘?  Colin Beavan and his family, who live in New York, took on a mission a few years back.  Here’s what he had to say:

“No Impact Man is my experiment with researching, developing and adopting a way of life for me and my little family—one wife, one toddler, one dog—to live in the heart of New York City while causing no net environmental impact. To do this, we will decrease the things we do that hurt the earth—make trash, cause carbon dioxide emissions, for example—and increase the things we do that help the earth—clean up the banks of the Hudson River, give money to charity, rescue sea birds, say.

In mathematical terms, in case you are an engineer or just a geek who likes math, we are trying to achieve an equilibrium that looks something like this:

Negative Impact + Positive Impact = Zero.

No net impact. Get it?”

A movie and a book also sprouted forth from this task.
Check out No Impact Man.com.

Join the Happyzine Team!

Do you want to write or blog about a project or a group that you’re passionate about?  Now’s the time to do it.  Happyzine’s expanding.  We’re about re-launch an upgraded version of our site and we want more bloggers, researchers and reporters to join us as we journey towards our dream of inspiring hundreds of thousands of people with good news each month.

Email us today to join the Happyzine whanau/family.


Wanted: Sub-Editors with Virgo Tendencies
Are you a details person?  Do spelling mistakes leap off the page and poke their tongues out at you, just daring you to correct them?  Do messy things make you twitch with the irrepressible urge to tidy-up?  Become a Sub-Editor for one of our amazing new team of bloggers and get as picky as you want.  Really go to town with those perfectionist tendencies of yours.  No writer is an island, we need Editors to proof-read our literary brilliance!    We’ll set you up with a just the right amount of work, and before you know it, you’ll be helping to make the world an even happier place.  Gain valuable experience and skills as a Sub-Editor for an on-line publication, whilst helping New Zealand’s way-cool good-news service flourish.

Email today and tell us all about yourself.

Wanted: A one-off blog, from you, about the true meaning of Christmas? What do you do?  What don’t you do? What feels good?  What do you think it should be all about? What do you eat?  Where will you be? How do you make it special? What challenges do you face and how do you turn them into opportunities? Share your words and inspire us to live an even happier Christmas season.


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