So this post isn’t strictly Christmasy, but if you stick around for the next couple of weeks, it will come back around. Honest.
I’m sure most of you have probably seen that cool new site wordle.net It’s a nifty little application that can make word art out of whatever text you submit, using the frequency of each word to determine its relative size. Then you customize the colors, the font, and the layout, and you’re left with a cool little word cloud.
Once I started playing around with this thing I had a flash of inspiration. As I’ve mentioned once or twice around here, our family motto is, “Go Team Edmunds!” It’s silly and fun, but it showcases that one of our highest priorities is unity. I love the brevity of it, but I’ve been thinking of how I can incorporate more of our family goals into something codifiable and articulated. I’ve seen some families make up a family crest, or create a motto they could translate into Latin. As soon as I saw Wordle I knew I had my method.
Bear and I sat down and made a list of traits we wanted our family to exemplify. We said, “Our house is a house of….” and filled in the blank. Once we had a list we were satisfied with, we then ranked them according to priority. I went a teensy bit crazy here and came up with a spreadsheet and a statistical analysis along with multiple ways of weighting each value to arrive at an actual mathematical priority, but if you don’t feel like breaking out Excel, you could just as easily rank them in order of importance.
I then typed our words into Wordle, with our higher priority words showing up more often than the lower priority words, and here’s what we ended up with:
If I remember right I typed our last name 20 times, the most important words 15 times, the next tier 10 times, then some 5 times and the last ones just once.
As my bloggy schedule looks right now, it should be around the 15th that I share what this has to do with our Christmas celebrations, so stay tuned.