xBlog: The original visual thinking weblog

What a great time of year. Soon people all around the world will be exchanging gifts and celebrating Christmas with their families.

If you celebrate the holiday, you must remember the utter excitement that you had as a kid on Christmas Eve — how you wanted so badly to catch Santa in the act but were told he wouldn’t come unless you went to sleep. Kids throughout time would doze off dreaming of gifts ranging from record players and Barbie dolls to iPads and Zhu Zhu pets.

What if you could put together a greatest hits collection (K-Tel anyone?) of the best gifts ever and spread them around one tree?

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Wouldn’t it be great if you could come to work and really focus on just one thing? Your sole function would be geared toward doing just that one thing — and doing it really, really well.

Yeah. Okay. Back to the reality of spinning plates, burning fires and high priority emails that seem endless. Your job requires doing many things at once, but you only have two arms. But what if you had four? Or six?
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Remember when you were little and Halloween meant canvassing a 3-mile radius of your home in order to see just how much candy can be packed into one pillowcase? Inevitably your costume was made by your mother in a way that was not nearly as cool, gory or princess-y as you’d like but that never stopped you in your search for sugary rewards.

This week for our Visual Meditation, take a few minutes to think about your favorite (or not-so-favorite) Halloween costumes through the years. Sketch one, scan it and upload it to our xBlog activities Group on Flickr.

• Exercise: Draw yourself in the one costume that most stands out. Use labels if necessary. Bonus points for labeling the candy you most liked and disliked.
• Flickr tag: xhalloween

Happy Halloween!