Awesome Holidays

The American Museum of Natural History and OrigamiUSA celebrate the holidays with a truly unique Christmas tree. The 13-foot tree has been decorated with over 1,000 handcrafted origami models inspired by gems, minerals, sharks, whales, and dinosaurs on exhibit throughout the museum. Photos by D. Finnin / AMNH.

Celebrate Halloween with these spooky salad plates from PATCH NYC and Crate & Barrel. Each glazed porcelain plate features a black and white woodcut design against a high-contrast color scheme. The set of 8″ plates includes scary skull, kooky kitty, crazy crow, and batty bat designs. Also: creepy old fashioned glasses.

(PG-13) A family takes a holiday vacation, but for some reason, their parents choose to put them up in a creepy old mansion that used to be a Children’s hospital. Naturally, really bad stuff starts happening, and their Christmas is ruined as the toys left behind start coming to life. Stream it just in time for Halloween on 10.27.2020.

Don’t end up in the doghouse this Valentine’s Day. Instead, grab your sweetheart a bouquet from Florists.com and get $40 worth of flowers for just $20 when you drop by The Awesomer Shop. They have a huge variety of flowers, plants, fruit bouquets, and gift baskets, and even offer same-day delivery (for an added fee.)

Help your holidays kick more ass with this ninja-shaped cookie kit. It packs in everything you need to bake an army of edible fighters, including cookie cutters, and enough gingerbread mix, royal icing, and candy beads to make 20 cookies. (Thanks Robb!)

It may be a thinly-veiled commercial for Xfinity’s cable and internet services, but with a grown-up Elliott reuniting with E.T. more than 30 years after they first met, this holiday promo will still tug at your heartstrings. Still, it made us wonder if E.T.’s telecommunication provider has data caps too.

Each year, Tom BetGeorge of Magical Light Shows tricks out the front of his Tracy, California house with tons of lights to celebrate Halloween, continually stepping up the show to outdo himself. For 2019, we get Ray Parker Jr’s Ghostbusters theme, accompanied by a brilliant array of color, and singing pumpkin animations.

LuminAID’s useful solar powered lantern gets transformed into a portable Jack-o-lantern. This 4.75″ inflatable cube runs on sunshine, and can light up in one of nine colors to add a festive touch to your Halloween festivities. It includes a variety of stickers for your kids to decorate with.

(PG-13: Language) A funny and sweet holiday commercial from Polish online retailer Allegro about a man on a mission to learn a second language, so he can be prepared for a very important trip to England.

Stay festive and slightly buzzed in the 24 days leading up to Xmas with an assortment of tiny bottles of booze. Includes a variety of gin, whiskey, and flavored vodka. New to the selection this year, a yummy brown sugar bourbon.

Each year, the town of Glacier View, Alaska celebrates Independence Day with a gathering of friends and family, followed by a parade and food. But instead of capping of the celebration with fireworks, they launch cars off of a cliff – a creative solution to the lack of darkness in July.

For A Very Murray Christmas, Phoenix covered Mike Love’s uplifting holiday single, with a few out of tune grunts from Bill Murray. The song was supposed to appear on a 1977 Beach Boys Christmas album, but it was never officially released until Love re-recorded it this year.

(Crude humor, PG-13: Language) “Baby It’s Cold Outside isn’t even a Christmas carol. It’s more like a police report.” The miserable fathers rant about taking plane trips with their kids, marrying too early, eggnog and more.

Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, vocalist Alex Boye and the Genesis Choir’s uplifting African version of the classic tune doesn’t put you in the holiday spirit, nothing will. Download the track on Bandcamp.

The Gregory Brothers borrow a page from Chase Holfelder’s Major to Minor, transforming happy songs into sad ones. For their holiday jam, they turned Jingle Bells into a dark sort of dirge that belongs in a Tim Burton movie.

Illustrator Jacob Elijah of Puppy Grenade decided that typical holiday cards were just too boring, so he created his own line of dark and twisted cards that are sure to get attention when you mail them out to this Christmas. Also, you don’t talk about Reindeer Fight Club.

The holidays can be stressful. Take the edge off the days leading up to Christmas with this sweet advent calendar loaded with 24 individual 50ml Heritage Distilling vodkas, gins, and whiskeys for your tasting pleasure. Save $10 if you order by 11/1/15.

In this clip from Distractify, a group of mothers is put to the test by their offspring, as they are asked a number of telling and uncomfortable questions while connected to a lie detector. Most of the moms are surprisingly honest.

In celebration of the Easter holiday, Nexus Productions and Download Festival put together this clip of some chicks rocking out and trashing the stage, as fuzzy little baby birds have been known to do.

When YouTuber bd594 isn’t making music with old computer equipment, he likes to dress up for the holidays. Here, the tinkerer demonstrates the most over-the-top ugly sweater of all time – complete with a working model railroad.

It’s an annual St. Paddy’s Day tradition here in Chicago – turning the normally brownish-green Chicago River into a bright green spectacle. This short time-lapse video by Peter Tsai does a great job capturing how it’s done.

Aymann Ismail of ANIMAL set up a camera overlooking a UPS distribution facility in NYC’s Hell’s Kitchen in the days leading up to Christmas, capturing the mesmerizing ballet of trucks moving in and out of narrow spaces.

Upscale UK retailer Harvey Nichols launched this tongue-in-cheek holiday campaign which suggests you spend your money on awesome gifts for yourself, leaving your family with such prized items as paper clips, toothpicks or gravel.