🎄 Christmas distractions: the Padoru tree

Ahhh, and here we are in November again this year. I would say that it is time to start the necessary procedure of thawing the Padoru.
...No, wait a minute. IT'S ALREADY MID DECEMBER?!?!?! 😐 😶 🤯
The months pass quickly... oh well.

What is "Padoru"

For many a controversial issue and a despised custom, that of the Padoru.
For those 3 people who live under the stones (and who I don't know how they could be reading this blog now, but I'll ignore it): it's a meme which, according to < a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/padoru" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Know Your Meme, born from a video game, Fate/EXTRA.
In a game scene, Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (I'm not joking) wears a Santa Claus costume, and dances in I walk around what I think is a corridor, singing an original parody of Jingle Bells, just 4 verses long.

<video class=“SmallVideoQuote Blockquote NoImgCenter” title=“The video of the game scene.” src=“https://sitoctt-assets.octt.eu.org/Media/Padoru/PadoruPadoru.webm” [:videoelemargs-controlmuteloopauto:]="">The video of the game scene.

HASHIRE SORI YO
KAZE NO YOU NI
TSUKIMIHARA WO
PADORU PADORU

I tried to look up the meaning of the little song, but I did not have satisfactory results.
The only thing I know is that the last verse (from which the popular name of the meme derives), "padoru padoru", is the Japanese equivalent of the Italian "cloppete cloppete", the onomatopoeia of the sound of the reindeer's hooves. I don't know how this is possible but, honestly, it's the least strange detail.

Internet customs

Online, various traditions have developed around this meme for several years.
The most banal are the excessive re-sharing of the original video or its GIF images, or the production and sharing of original memes that refer to the initial concept.
Then, people began to deprecate the expression "Christmas season", in favor of a more magical "Padoru season" - which is not really a replacement term 1:1, because it can also indicate the weeks a moment before perhaps those of Advent, those of November that I mentioned at the beginning and in which we are already starting with the Padoru guerrilla war on the communication platforms.

The most beautiful custom (due to its passive-aggressiveness), according to my tastes, is to change the photos of one's various profiles with the image of a Padoru.
There are people who use their shared sense of humor to implement this thing as a (very relatively) mass operation. Then there are those who observe the phenomenon but are not aware of the meaning, do not understand, get angry, and are confused to the point of hitting themselves; or, who knows him perfectly, and gets even more angry because, well, maybe he despises Christmas.

If you are reading carefully, you will have noticed that I have just used, not surprisingly, the indefinite article... If you haven't noticed, you are getting distracted, and therefore , as punishment for your good, now I must necessarily force you to sing the above song out loud 3 times 👺.

High customization

An important factor that has allowed this meme to become the phenomenon it is can be seen in its being extremely customizable.
I don't know when this trend started, but at a certain point there were those who saw that the Padoru, Nero's original drawing in the video sequence that sparked it all, it's really simple to remix.

If you look at it with absent or at least down-to-earth inventiveness, you realize that you can change the colors in the blink of an eye with others that can equally look good, and It almost has a new design.
However, those who have a minimum of creativity can without difficulty try to modify some of the shapes of the character, changing the right here and there to reconstruct a totally different character - whether original, or already existing but only drawn with other styles - in the form of that smiling little thing who runs around breaking up with his festive verse.

This stuff is so extremely easy that even I, who normally if I try to draw anything artistic (or at least not very technical) create real glitches >, I was able to create my very personal Padoru without any suffering.
In just 2 very scant hours, one morning on December 1st at school - I don't remember if it was a day of assembly or of various substitutes - a little tracing the basic lines of the Padoru aspect, a little introducing original features (which I derived from my 3D character, the one that appears in some of my profile photos throughout the year), with a generic drawing app on my smartphone I did what I felt I had to do .
The result was that, simply, something normal emerged; no horror! Very good.

Last year I created my Padoru specifically to use it as a profile photo (on Telegram), and I did.
The year before I had used one that wasn't mine, modeled on the kitsune Senko-san, and the previous year I had posted other types of Padoru memes.

This year I haven't done a whole lot of anything... and the peculiar thing is that I don't know how to explain it. Zero. 😶
What I suspect is that, simply, I forget 💀 (I forgot about it 💀). 2 weeks ago I unfortunately had too many things on my mind: first my Misskey instance malfunctions and I have to run, then the fixation with ChatGPT, it's clear that there was really no way to reserve 30 seconds of time to update the photo of not even a single one of my online accounts.
At this point, I don't know whether to make the change now and therefore take advantage of all the time remaining until the end of the Christmas period to be Padoruante, or follow a minimal logic and wait the beginning of next week: the last week of Advent and the first of the holidays, it would make sense.

Last year I may have gone all out with digital photos, but the physical side was accidentally neglected by me.
Let's go in order.

All my parents actually put up the generic Christmas decorations at home - my mother in particular, who also has power to vetoon any overly progressive proposals regarding the large Christmas tree - in the first days of December.
Among the things that are taken back from the attic every year, there is also a small desk tree which is practically mine. It has integrated lights, powered by AA batteries, but in itself it is nothing too special. Or rather, that's how it was before I revolutionized it, 3 years ago (it was 2019!).

Modify the tree

I think the flash of genius came after seeing a photo on the Internet, which depicted a Christmas tree (of normal size) with attached to a pair of paper pads; exactly like other types of decorations that hang, but less socially acceptable.
The idea had now taken possession of me, and at this point I had to recreate the same thing myself. I opened what was my trusted web search engine at the time, and searched for "padorus images" (or something like that), to create an assorted set of some of those little drawings, downloading the ones that caught my attention and I liked aesthetically the most.

At that moment I had a choice in front of me: do I print them big enough and put them on the big tree, or do I print them small to be able to put them on the tree? little tree?
To be honest, it wasn't a question of choice, as the first option was automatically to be thrown away due to my mother's veto, but the second option certainly intrigued me: the The little tree was (and is) in my room, so its normality would be completely wasted without some creative embellishment.

Once the print was done, all that remained for me was to cut out, more or less roughly (nevertheless, a good amount of work was strangely needed), the various Padoru, to then attach them to the tree with a little hot glue.
It turned out what I wanted, so I appreciated the work and took a photo to set it as my profile picture. The following year, the tree remained as it was.

In the present

As regards this year, once I finally mentally entered the Padorizia atmosphere, contemplating that object that has been there for days on my bedside table, I thought it was a bit empty, and needed other Padoru.

The other day I thought that I should then look for some new ones online to print them, but a moment later it comes back to me a folder, which I found last month on my PC while I was cleaning.
It contains my original Padoru, and various others that I remembered having downloaded, but that I wasn't too sure I had > never printed. The files are all dated December 2021, which is obvious for the only one I created, but actually curious for the others, if you consider the whole scenario.

Even more curiously, one of the files present there is an image, with an aspect ratio equal to that of an A4 sheet, where all the individual images in the folder are arranged.^{< a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn1">1}
"I will have composed it last year and in the end perhaps I will never have printed it again", I think; and yet, something else in my mind tells me that I actually printed it all right, and maybe I simply never used it in the end. Surely, I have never attached those Padoru to the tree, because there are only those from 3 years ago.
For less than a quarter of an hour I searched for this unfortunate sheet in my room but, not finding it, I decided to reprint it. Oh God, I actually found a paper by Padoru... more or less: I found a fragment of the paper from 2019, with 3 images that I never used at the time.

Without wasting any more time, I send the document to the home printer, which promptly gives me back... a blank sheet of paper? It looked like it, but then I picked it up and noticed that it had been printed. The image? NO! A STAIN! 🤬
Immediately, anger takes over, but a second later it is overcome by an even stronger sensation: one of "already seen". p>

...A little earlier

At this point, something comes back to me, and I open the history of my Telegram channel (which I use as a micro-microblog) to look for answers to my suspicions : well, I printed these images last year. Now I remembered well!
The exact same problem had happened with the print going to hell which, strangely, occurs on 2 different printers, only by sending to print via the official application of Epson (printer manufacturer) for Android, and only for this image (PNG 2480x3472 of 9 MB), among all the ones I have had to print in my life.
For the first time I wasted time with my father - who had previously used the printer without any particular problems - first changing a cartridge marked empty, then cleaning the heads; after I don't know how many wasted minutes, on the third attempt to print I did it from my father's Windows PC, and the image finally came out. 😶u200d🌫️🔪

Anyway, my intention, that distant day, was to troll² my mother: print some new Padoru, all different and coloured, to attach them to the large Christmas tree, which that year it had been decorated by her with decorations categorically tending towards white.
In short, I printed all those there, but I only put 1 in number on the tree (among other things, it seems like 2 days passed before my mother noticed 😂), so it's clear that < strong>I plannedto do something with those others. I probably would have liked to put them on the mini-tree, but (yet, evidently) I never did it. Did I forger (💀)? Very likely: these last December were also somewhat busy weeks, but I made January arrive (time to refreeze Christmas and all the decorations, Padoru and otherwise) without do nothing, then the thing will have just slipped my mind.

Between yesterday and the day before yesterday, I first cut out a good part of the Padoru; not all of them, because otherwise I really spend hours on them, and because there won't be any left on my desk tree. 🤷u200d♀️
This time I used the scissors in a truly painstaking manner, and I outlined the figures with a very high definition; by my shredding standards of drawings that have a lot of fine details of complex shapes, at least, it is.
After this task - which would also be relaxing, if I didn't have to stare bend3 because of the light - with the hot glue gun, little by little (which still requires much less time than cutting) I glued all the figurines to the external leaf walls of the tree. I took the advantage of it to fix the elements stuck together 3 years ago, which were holding up but not very solidly... I probably did the job badly, < strong>at the time.

This here is the result, I really like it a lot.

Aside from the beauty of the object on a level that is personal for me, and having realized how it could - just in my eyes - become more beautiful, if it had become even newer and less standard, the high stakes of writing an article here worked miracles: it made me strong>completea very simple manual activity, practically kindergarten-level do-it-yourself, without my brain canceling it after half a day !

To conclude, in essence we can - not ironically - say that it took an entire year for me to finally manage to attach a satisfactory quantity of small Padoru to my little tree.
The day before yesterday I started writing this article, believing that I would simply talk about how the idea originated for me and what I did to expand it in these two days, but then I rediscovered these details which are directly intertwined with the < strong>last year... wonderful. I think the story actually became more interesting to tell, after these misadventures due to the questionable functioning of my brain.

🏷️ Notes and References

• Update of 2022-12-24: I uploaded some more photos about the story on Pixelfed: pixelfed.uno/p/octo/512223099419845225.