Monday, January 05, 2009
The Color of Bunnies
Posted October 12th, 2008 by Arnold Aprill
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Every year, at Easter time, I buy a new box of yellow "Peeps" (marshmallow candy chicks) as a kind of ready-made art installation that I keep on my living room coffee table. They look comfortable and attractive and synthetic in their neat little rows, sealed beneath the cellophane. I keep them in the box. I don't eat them, I don't give them to friends, I have never baked them in the microwave (urban legend tells of Peeps expanding in the microwave to sizes and shapes beyond imagination.) I buy a new box every year - not because they don't last (Peeps may be, like Twinkies, indestructible - their durability existing in direct inverse proportion to their nutritional value), but as a seasonal ritual. The price has remained, for the last several years, at exactly $1.59 (one of the few commodities in our economy apparently not subject to massive inflation).
Peeps also come in bunny shapes - pink and purple - but I consider the yellow chicks the truly classic Peeps.
Meditating on the color of Peeps chicks and bunnies made me realize that many of our holidays are color-coded, that they have their own "gang signs": Yellow, Pink, and Purple for Easter; Blue and White for Chanukah; Orange and Black for Halloween; Red and Green for Christmas.
Where did these colors come from? When did they become inscribed in the public imagination? And what does all this holiday color-coding mean? Dear Bloggers, kindly share your color-coded thoughts about this enduring mystery.
Arnold Aprill
Founding and Creative Director
Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE)
www.capeweb.org
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Color-Coding Is All About Consumerism and Marketing
I once came across an article on color-coding that focused on building effective marketing strategies.After having read the article, I was struck by sales and marketing teams' process of dividing color names into various categories such as : "common (e.g. "dark green")," "common descriptive (just as, "pine green")," "unexpected descriptive (such as "Kermit green!")," or flat-out ambiguous (like, "friendly green!)," before deciding which colors their particular products should be, before they go out to the market.
I then realized that all these years, the color-coded traditions and celebrations that I had been accustomed to were not about the colors associated with them, but the mental conditioning that I was exposed to, as it was not obviously being promoted by profit-driven business organizations. I now have also realized that my favorite color really isn't pink (just because girls should always choose pink over the color blue, which is for boys). Whenever I look at myself in the mirror, I don't see brown. I merely feel my presence in the absence of color. I choose to close my eyes to bask in the joy of reliving the memories of my rainbow-filled childhood.
"What is essential is invisible to the eye."
-The Little Prince