Chillin' At The Winter Ice Christmas Fest STACEY CARDALINES REPORTING

 

If you didn't get enough Christmas at Christmas, hey, no problem. Some places on SL are keeping it Jolly well into January. We tried one of them out today... The Winter Ice Christmas Fest.

You can skirt around the having-a-Christmas-party-after-Christmas problem in several ways, both religious and secular. You can use the Twelve Days Of Christmas argument, with the 12 days running from Christmas Eve through January 6th. I think this is when the wise men found Jesus, aka the Adoration Of The Magi. After that, if you still have the tree up (or the sim running), you move into the Eccentric area.

You can hold out until the next holiday, which is Martin Luther King Day on January 18th or so. Holiday overlap is peer pressure-regulated, as your family is going to look at you mighty odd if you set off 4th of July fireworks on Easter or if you show up at a Memorial Day service dressed for Halloween in a witch costume. There may be some Europe or Asia Day holiday in January, I have no idea. However, that gives you a little more wiggle room vis a vis leaving the Christmas stuff up in mid-January.

The easiest way is to name your Christmas sim as a Winter sim, which means that you can leave it up until April if you want. People like winter. OK, they hate it, but they like certain parts of it. Snow is lovely in a world where it never gets cold and where you don't have to drive anywhere. Many people live in places that don't get "real" winter, meaning "snow all over everything." They might enjoy visiting that element in a virtual world. A wise sim owner is positioned to meet the needs of such people.

Winter Fests can't rely on Santa like Christmas sims can. They need other things that people associate with winter. The Winter Ice Christmas Fest is chock full of seasonal goodness. 

I started off by taking a reindeer sleigh ride around the sim. It was useful to me in a scouting sense, as I got an aerial view of the place I had to be journalistic about. The reindeer take you along the ground, but they go airborne to avoid obstacles. It was an open-top 4 seater sled, with Santa in the Jackie Kennedy position and me in the Governor Connolly spot. It was a lot of fun, although we only had 3 reindeer. Rudolph was one of them.

You can only see so much from the air, so I got my feet on the ground and made some tracks in the snow like a tiny Yeti. The Winter Fest is, of course, snowy. It is also sort of Snowburban, a rural village with a few blocks of taller buildings. "Ski Chalet" describes the architecture well enough. You're sort of shooting for Swiss village looks with winter sims, rather than Miami. This place is so Swiss village looking, people will cough out cocoa if you sneak up and smack them on the back.

It's very romantic. If you have a girlfriend, take her here. If you don't, hang around and try to charm some friendly stranger into Santa's sleigh with you. "I hear he can get you off the Naughty List..." Men have gone five-hole on many women with worse lines than that... and remember, even if your Method fails 99.9% of the time, it only means that you have to bother 1000 women before the dice come up 7 for you. The numbers are the same if you switch the genders around in the equation.

There was also sledding available, but I'll get to Sledding in some future articles. This is more of a Touring sim, somewhere you'd go to take a walk and look at beautiful winter scenery. They're also only open until January 7th, so I'd recommend hurrying.

Winter Ice Christmas Fest = http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/REBEL%20YELL%20CONCERTS/65/41/28