Christmas Foods!

I was requested to share some recipes for traditional German Christmas foods that I bring out by the truck load in December.

Under the cut are recipes for Pfeffernüsse and Stollen. German Christmas goodies are time consuming, if nothing else. They can take a lot of practice to get right, and in the case of Stollen, most Germans buy them from the various official stollen bakeries in their part of the country. I eat so much stollen and so many pfeffernüsse during the holidays I mostly buy them in order to keep my sanity.

For Baumkuchen, go here: http://historyskarp.blogspot.com/2010/04/baumkuchen.html

New Object

For the final, I had to pick a 'new' object. To save some of my precious sanity, I am substituting a stuffed cat for a stuffed tiger. I attempted to find another stuffed tiger or stuffed wild cat, but unfortunately the only one I know of resides in Ohio.

So here we go. My new object, a Beanie Baby Ty Classic plush cat from 2003.

This a stuffed animal I own and was closest to all the research I had already done on the Beanie Buddy tiger I used for other posts. Officially named 'Chica', my sixteen year old self renamed it 'meow-kitty' potentially due to  sleep deprivation or a desire to avoid homework by reverting back to my six year old self. This stuffed animal was one of two Beanie cats received as a gift. I had them in my room at college. Its matted fur now resulting in a pirate eye is the result of a vase full of water falling on my bed/desk/room freshman year and thus leading to a trip through the dryer.

I would be a bad candidate for the First Person Arts for I tell less-than-invigorating stories about my objects.

I also apologize for the poor photography present in this post. Between the disembodied hand and strange macbook induced lighting it looks much more threatening that I desired.

Exhibit Review

First Person Museum, Vicki Solot, director; Temple University History Graduate Students, historians; The Painted Bride Art Center Philadelphia, exhibit space; 5 November -18 December 2010.

The First Person Museum is part of a larger concept called “First Person Arts” developed by Vicky Solot with the help of a small Pew Innovation Grant. The mission of First Person Arts is to transform  “the drama of real life into memoir and documentary art to foster appreciation for
our unique and shared experience.”[1] From this goal, Solot produced the idea for a museum. The museum highlights sixteen stories and objects, chosen from a larger group of sixty stories shared by community group members in Philadelphia within the First Person Arts mission. The exhibit is formulated around five goals, which desire the visitor to understand the value people place on objects, the cultural and societal context that influence their meaning of the objects and respond emotionally to them and their own objects.

            The objects belong to Philadelphians of all classes, races, genders and ages, and the audience is similarly diverse, from young children to senior citizens, coming the middle class neighborhood surrounding the museum as well as the rest of Philadelphia.  The exhibit has been well attended, demonstrated by the seventy visitors in one hour on a Friday evening. Each of the sixteen objects is displayed in a semi-domestic space—a ring on a table, a stuffed animal on a rocking chair. With the objects is a caption entitled “A Bit of History” which tells the history of the object or object category e.g., “About Stuffed Animals” for a Stuffed Tiger. For each object, the visitor can experience the story that goes with it. Some stories are told through text panels, others listened through headphones, and some seen through short films. Photographs of the owner surround the object, caption or story. Visitors can add their own story by filling out small cards and posting them on tack boards.  For the participants who shared their stories but whose objects were not showcased, one-sentence stories accompanied by a photograph are in a separate room.

            The exhibit successfully fulfills its goals—visitors engage the objects, enjoy the stories and can be heard discussing their own objects in relation to what they see in the exhibit. Part of the success is the variety available in the exhibit.  The captions are large and colorful; the photographs of the owners often express different emotions than found in the story. Instead of reading all the stories, one can hear the voice of the owner, or see how they interact with the object on film.  The furniture nods to the idea domestic space without creating an in-situ experience. Museums can often feel sterile, void of significant color and full of tiny text panels—the First Person Museum however creates an approachable and colorful environment where conversation is desired and not to be left outside. In some cases the space could be more fully used, incorporating the main objects all in one room rather than separated to ensure equal viewing and fill in dead space. If the museum were performed on a larger scale, issues would arise with the spoken stories (only one headset), however with the flow and numbers in this case, it did not appear to be a problem.

            This exhibit stresses that multiple approaches retain visitor attention. While the space is cohesive through its furniture and general set up, the exhibit maintains variety in order to veer away from a fully text display. Mixing text, audio, video and photos keeps the objects from becoming repetitive, and prevents reader fatigue. More importantly the mix of emotions found in this varied approach, whether in the stories, photographs or captions, similarly attracts the attention of the visitor and keeps them engaged.

            The presentation of the museum was in some ways experimental, and it was at first difficult to imagine how a museum about personal objects could be a history museum. However these very personal stories produce a discourse on issues of memory and value and a broader culture and society commentary. While the object stories discuss very personal matters, their histories explored broader themes and prompted discussion of current topics such as marriage, citizenship, deviance and immigration. These histories encourage visitors to think about seemingly over-politicized or dry topics through different avenues and introducing a more comfortable way through which to engage history, and the culture and society around them—their own stuff.  One of the objects, Amy’s Birth Certificate, a German birth certificate for an American citizen born abroad, tackles issues of citizenship—how one proves their citizenship, and how is citizenship defined. It also can lead to discussion of post-WWII race relations in the United States, since race is absent on this certificate but would have been present on an American certificate. Of course this presentation, with the story informing the history and vice versa, there is a danger that the visitor may leave with a particularly one-sided understanding of a topic.

            While not necessarily an in-depth discussion of any particular theme, period or topic, First Person Museum allows the visitor to engage many aspects of history without becoming overwhelmed by the topic. The exhibit largely avoids this problem. Since being overwhelmed by information is a common complaint from museum visitors, this exhibit piques interest in a variety of time periods and topics and attempts to tie them together through the shared space and experience of Philadelphia. In the end a visitor leaves the museum with a cursory understanding or potentially deeper interest in a variety of topics, as well as a more nuanced involvement with the city they live in or near. The sometime- shallow historical investigation prompted by this exhibit may concern some historians. It is a legitimate concern, however it appears that visitors exit this exhibit legitimately interested and involved with what they just viewed, rather than exhausted from text and overwhelmed by detail. Between this heightened level of interest and the approachability of the exhibit, the First Person Museum is an overall positive experience and effective exhibit that educates and engages the visitor.

           

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[1] First Person Arts, www.firstpersonarts.org.

And the moment we've all been waiting for...

Here are my captions!

About Ownership:

The Steiff Toy Company first mass-produced stuffed animals in the 1880s. Originally hand-stitched with plush mohair fur, they were expensive luxury items due to the cost of production. Today cheap synthetic materials and low overseas production costs make stuffed animals an inexpensive and thus common possession for children and adults.

About Personification:

Despite being inanimate objects people ascribe human characterizes onto stuffed animals. They are given names, personalities and emotions. Tigger (Winnie the Pooh) and Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes) are two popular examples of such personification. Through these human characteristics stuffed animals become sources of emotional expression and comfort for their owners.

About Nostalgia:

People of varying ages identify strongly with the stories in The Velveteen Rabbit and Toy Story because stuffed animals play important roles throughout our lives. They are sources of comfort and entertainment as children, remind us of home when in college and prompt familiar and pleasant memories as adults.

About Stuffed Tigers:

From Tigger in Winnie the Pooh to Calvin’s philosophical pal Hobbes in Bill Watterson’s famous comic strip, stuffed tigers are familiar figures in American culture. Building on this familiarity and popularity, the World Wildlife Fund sells plush tigers to promote education and activism regarding the dangers of poaching endangered wildlife.  

About Function:           

In addition to being toys, stuffed animals function as promotional and collector’s items and expressions of trauma and support. The Ty Beanie Baby Company produces animals in honor of Princess Diana, for the World Cup, to promote cancer research and Teenie Beanies, a collectible set found in McDonald’s Happy Meals

Happy decision making!

Sources:

Andrew Christie (January 1987). "An Interview With Bill Watterson : The creator of Calvin and Hobbes on cartooning, syndicates, Garfield, Charles Schulz, and editors". Honk magazine.

Deborah Jaffe, The History of Toys: From Spinning Tops to Robots,  Thrupp, UK: Sutton Publishing Limited, 2006. 

Official Steiff Website

Complete List of Beanie Babies. http://www.aboutbeanies.com/beaniebabies.html

A.A Milne, The Winnie the Pooh

Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes 

Hampshire Museum Services, http://www3.hants.gov.uk/museum/childhood-collections/toys/dolls-soft-toys.htm 

The Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood, http://www.vam.ac.uk/moc/ 

World Wildlife Fund, http://www.worldwildlife.org/ogc/species_SKU.cfm?cqs=CTTG 

Museum Design: aka how to have too much fun with floor plans

This week's assignment grew far bigger than  it probably should have. But it did lead to some fun conversations with visitors at work who wondered why I was furiously drawing and sketching floor plans.
I apologize for the weird formatting this week. Not sure what happened, but the spacing is seriously out of whack and if there are random symbols, I promise I did not mean for them to be there.

For my museums plans, I used the objects and general concept of First Person Arts as we know it, including the number of objects. The big differences: unlimited quantities of money and an altered theme statement.  I threw in some influences of my park interp training, and pulled some aspects of Interpretive Service Plans to organize the first step.


Step #1: Mission Statement, Take-Home Messages, and Storyline

Theme Statement: Objects serve practical functions in our lives. They also represent memories and feelings upon which we organize our homes, relationships and cultural understanding. Due to the meanings we find in and ascribe upon objects, each represents a story. 

Goals: What you hope to accomplish with the presentation

• Present an understanding that we organize our lives with objects
• To describe what purposes objects fill in our lives.
• To inform people of the origins of every day objects
• To gain a deeper understanding of our culture as one of materials and objects

Objectives: Measurable accomplishments

At the end of the program the visitor will be able to:

• Name Three stories they heard
• Identity two  modes of organization of objects
• Explain the function and production of one of the objects and the importance there of.
• Tell us about an object they organize their lives around 

Step #2: "Galleries of Thought"/Step #3: Inventory & Facts

So, with those goals and themes in mind, I separated the objects into spaces, or modes of organization: Objects of Home, Objects of Comfort, Objects of Memory and Objects of Adventure (in that order for a specific reason).  I am aware that these categories are extremely flexible but go with me here. The objects in these categories are:

Home: Birth Certificate, Pan, Wall Hanging and Painting.

Comfort: Tiger, Rhino, Shawl, Dolls

Memory: sock, wedding ring, boxers, wedding ring

Adventure: Passport, map, fishing license, pen.


Steps #4: Motivate & Engage Visitors

Main concerns for set up: Traffic Flow and access to objects and story at same time without too much reading. I did not want the objects to sit in a made up trying-hard-to-look-like home atmosphere, rather aspects that hinted at context without pretending they were there.

Getting the Stories: Visitors get headphones at the front desk to listen to stories, with numbers at each object to prompt story. 
Understanding the spaces: Longer text panel introduces the whole exhibit, giving people an object such as a hair brush or other ordinary thing to look at and asking them to think of what they do with it, where it sits in their house and then delving into a short discussion of the theme. Each room would have a short introductory panel.


Step #5 Create the Look & Feel
Engaging the objects: Each room has four objects and one more interactive experience, either something to touch (a sample of fabric from one of the objects), a short film about production of the object, or how people use it in other cultures. Each object would have a short description a la what we are doing (got to make us relevant in this experience). Each object would be on display in some sort of case that allows the visitor to see the object from all around. On the walls there would be pictures of the object in the context of its story potentially with its owner, then a picture of it in another context (manufacture, store, another culture) and proper signage. Visitors can more fully understand the origins, purpose AND emotional meaning of the object from the mixed approaches of visual, text, photos, and tactile interaction.  Visitors retain much more when they they observe and touch, than when they read and are spoken to.
Engaging the Space: There would be plenty of places to sit (including a rocking chair in the 'home' section and a bean bag chair in the 'comfort' section). Other small things include obviously placed bathrooms and offices for the staff so they don't mutiny. If I was better with the program, I would have changed the colors of the rooms (Home: yellow, Comfort: beige, Memory: blue, Adventure: green) because people associate colors with feelings, places and objects. And making every room white is just boring. Lights would be of a lower, softer voltage, set on walls rather than the ceiling to avoid the feeling of being in a hospital.There would be a more interactive section at the end where people could share their own stories, react to other objects, try making objects. Revenue could be made off of a catalog, photos, or discs of the stories. Limited, straight forward merchandise.  

And after wrestling with Floorplanner for a few hours, this is what I came up with for the set up of the museum. I have put a variety of objects in place of display cases (lamps, book cases) and info panels (screens) and it seems my walls have some trouble. 

 

Not the best screen shot, but you get the point.  The squiggly things are intro panels. Imagine the square, round and multi colored things are varying types of display cases which can either hold just the object, or the object and pictures. The triangular objects would be more interactive displays with videos, touchable objects, other questions.
Before class tomorrow I will include a mock up drawing of a display. However, technology is not cooperating at the moment and I wish to put this out before midnight.

Cultural and Social Context

First off, a note of celebration. I have a picture of my object! whoo. However, I do not yet have clearance to post the photos and I was not bored enough at work this weekend to draw a picture. Granted, now that I have a picture I must re-do my first and sort of re-do my second blog post. Alas. But what is grad school without challenges? So in this week's installment of let's talk about a stuffed tiger, we discuss cultural and societal context. This particular tiger, admittedly, has little social or cultural context. In fact, if most people saw him they wouldn't think very much, or would construct a story about who it belonged to (probably a small child) and what its purpose was (comfort). They'd be sort of right. In order to actually get something out of this post, I will once again be broadening the subject to stuffed animals in general, and point of some specific tigers in the process.

Cultural Social Context of Stuffed Tigers/Animals:

Original design Tigger at left.

America, surprisingly enough, has a handful of stuffed tigers that function as pervasive cultural references. Two feature prominently in my blog title: Tigger and Hobbes. Tigger is the rambunctious pal of Winnie the Pooh (who much to my five year old self's annoyance is a constantly plague to Eeyore). Tigger in plush form takes two styles, that of the original A.A. Milne design and the more cultural pervasive image produced by Disney. Tigger is well known in America and England among both children and adults, even if they have not read the Winnie the Pooh stories or seen the television show.

Hobbes is in some ways, arguably less well known. Since  Bill Watterson's comic strip ended in 1995, Calvin and his anthropomorphized  tiger pal Hobbes are increasing less recognized by people under the age of 12.* Hobbes, who appears as a stuffed animal to all other characters, comes to life when accompanied by his owner Calvin. He serves often as Calvin's voice of reason and is up to frighten Calvin with a good pounce. Hobbes often waxes lyrical about humanity, life and other philosophical subjects. Both tigers who are stuffed animals to one set of viewers but talking, responsive characters to others allow the creators to play with understanding of childhood versus adulthood, the role of toys in a persons life and influences of ones imagination. In an interview with Honk Magazine in 1987 Watterson noted "'When Hobbes is a stuffed toy in one panel and alive in the next, I'm juxtaposing the 'grown-up' version of reality with Calvin's version, and inviting the reader to decide which is truer'", noting the flexibility of signifiers of  age.

Stuffed animals in general also function as a shared experience in society. As exhibited by the popularity of and emotional response illicited across the population by the story The Velveteen Rabit  and the Toy Story movies, stuffed animals play an important and recognizable role in our society, whether we are willing to admit it or not (returning to the conflict of childhood vs. adulthood). They symbolize traumatic events (the Oklahoma City bombings, the death of Princess Diana, for example), comfort and a myriad of other emotions, demonstrated by the ability to buy a stuffed animal for any event, their display smartly placed right next to the greeting cards in most drug stores. In other cultures, specifically in China and India, stuffed tigers can be representations of gods, faith and power and are presented as ceremonial and celebratory gifts.

For the rest of this post, I am going to indulge myself and post some Calvin and Hobbes strips.

*Cultural understanding gauged on an oh-so-scientific study done on the poor visitors at work who are increasingly my public history guinea pigs. 

Object History: Stuffed Animals

Once again, this post comes with a preface: I (still) have not seen my object in any way. So, we will be continuing this experiment with the tiger described in the last post, India, the 2001 Ty Beanie Buddy.

It has been surprisingly difficult compiling the history of the 'stuffed animal'. Semantic issues caused a lot of searches to end in detailed descriptions of taxiderm-ied wildlife. Most commonly, my attempts at determining the history of 'stuffed animals' (as opposed to stuffed toys, which could mean dolls, puppets, plant life, etc) have led to histories of the teddy bear. Changing my search terms to include 'plush animals' helped greatly. This blog will essentially have two parts. First the history of this particular tiger, then a longer history of stuffed animals after the jump.

History of "India" the Tiger:
India began its life in China as one of hundreds of hand/machine sewn, synthetic fabric construction Beanie Buddies marketed towards children in 2001. India is a part of the Ty Beanie Baby empire which began producing small, bean and fiber-filled stuffed animals in the late 1980s. India's sub category was never quite so popular as the original Beanie Baby, and almost entirely purchased by or for children and adolescents as a comforting toy, not as a collector's item. India was then shipped to the United States and sold in a variety of stores including drug stores, toy stores and gift shops. The stuffed animal could have sat in a variety of warehouses and shelves between the time of production and time of purchase. India the tiger is a not a rare stuffed animal, but is very important to Leyla.
This particular tiger stuffed animal was purchased in the United States in 2001 and given to Leyla in the same year by her Aunt and Uncle to serve as source of comfort in a complicated transitional time in her life. She was 16 at the time.  While I am not positive, Leyla seems to be the tiger's first and only owner. The tiger has been re-moniker-ed as Mr. Pugsley, gendered male and been attributed meaning by Leyla, who now sees him as a type of companion. He  has traveled across the globe over the last nine years, going to LA, Philly and Ireland.  He occasionally takes some jaunts through the washing machine, and sometimes finds himself as a pillow for he 'lives' in Leyla's bed. He has had the life of a favorite stuffed animal and Leyla describes him as somewhat mis-shapen and smushed due to his occasional use as a pillow.  Mr. Pugsley could probably tell a pretty specific and substantial story of Leyla's life for he seems to have followed her everywhere throughout the last nine years of her life.

Ultimately, stuffed/plush animals are children's toys meant to comfort and with which to play. Where they were produced, what they are made out of or the number produced weighs little on the security (and anxiety when lost) they can provide to a child. Many of these toys given or purchased in childhood, much like Mr. Pugsley, follow us into adulthood, sit in our rooms at college, and continue to serve as sources of comfort, security and a reminder of specific moments in our lives. 

Follow the link for History of Plush Animals: