The Stories Behind Holiday Colors

December is here, and that means individuals all around the world will be celebrating holidays like Hanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa, just to name a few. The December season is a favored time of year that is associated with excellent food, gifts, and time spent with family. Not only that, holiday seasons are often represented by unique, symbolic colors. Have you ever wondered why certain colors are designated to different holiday seasons? Let’s find out…

 

What do Kwanzaa’s shades symbolize?

Kwanzaa, established in 1966, is one of the most recent holidays to be founded. The colors used in Kwanzaa celebrations are red, black, and yellow. Related to Kwanzaa, green stands for “the land of Africa and hope for the future.” Red symbolizes the blood of Africans who have passed away, whereas black represents the skin shade of Africans. Kwanzaa, which is a holiday that honors African-American culture, centers on creativity, faith, self-determination, and togetherness.

Blue and white are significant to Jewish culture.

Most people are aware of the fact that the blue and white shades represented in Hanukkah décor are the colors of the Israeli flag. But what do these shades symbolize? According to a rabbinical interpretation, blue represents divine revelation as well as heaven. Better than any other color, white symbolizes cleanliness and purity. These colors that are so prominent in the design of the Israeli flag are also displayed on the Jewish prayer shawl (tallit), making them an integral part of Jewish culture.

Why red and green for Christmas?

The famed shades for Christmas are, without a doubt, green and red. But what do these colors represent? Green is representative of the evergreen tree, which symbolizes eternal life and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Red may represent the blood of Christ, but researchers are unsure of the exact symbolic meaning of this shade. What they do know, though, is that the combination of red and green likely stems from holly Christmas decorations that were used in Europe in the Middle Ages.

Make this Holiday season more memorable by creating your own seasonally themed works of art. Segmation offers a SegPlayPC Christmas Time pattern “paint-by-numbers” collection that makes it easy and fast to enjoy the Christmas Time celebration and more. Learn more about Segmation’s Christmas Time pattern collection by visiting http://www.segmation.com/products_pc_patternsets.asp#CHR. Sources: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/what-color-is-your-holiday-chr-104238

Coming Soon:
Read Segmation’s exclusive article about the season that inspired so much of famed artist Norman Rockwell’s timeless works.

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• Childhood Stories of Paint by Number

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Be my Valentine by www.segmation.com

You'll find in our SegPlayPC Be My Valentine pattern collection. This is a fun, off-beat set of great colorful digital patterns. We know you'll enjoy coloring these great patterns! What a great stress reliever as well.

Gorgeous art painting patterns to color and relax with. You don't have to be a professional artist to enjoy this. Join the fun today! Segmation.com

Valentine's Day is celebrated around the world on February 14th. It’s a magical day where lovers express their love for one another in many traditional and untraditional ways. In today's time, candy, chocolates, flowers, and heart filled cards are usually given as gifts in many cultures around the globe. Our set of Valentine themed patterns includes many illustrated graphics of the holiday including roses, candy, cupids with arrows, dragons and puppies in love, and couples in love. Happy Valentine's Day to all!
This set contains 24 paintable patterns.

You can find a wide collection of Be my Valentine Scenes paint by number patterns and is available at the Segmation web site. These patterns may be viewed, painted, and printed using SegPlay™PC a fun, computerized paint-by-numbers program for Windows 7, 2000, XP, and Vista. Enjoy!



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The Lingo of Color www.segmation.com

It is said that the human eye can discern between 1 million and 7 million colors. Do you think you could name them all?

Most people can easily identify the 3 primary colors (red, yellow, blue), and the three secondary colors (orange, green and purple), plus white and black. It’s their many mixtures, variants, tints and shades that cause a stumbling block when it comes to identifying colors.

Because of their familiarity with pigments, artists have a slew of color names at their disposal when it comes to naming colors. (For instance, “I painted a Cerulean sky over an Ultramarine ocean, tinged with hints of Light Hansa.”) These terms may leave non-artists scratching their heads. Where do these color names originate?

As we discussed in a previous article, some artist pigments are named for the material that they are made from (cobalt blue, made from cobalt), or the place where they the pigments first came from (burnt sienna, from Sienna, Italy). Other colors are named for the person who first discovered the pigment that could be used to create the color (fuchsia, named for the German scientist Leonard Fuchs).

The complexity of color is difficult to pin down with the limitations of language – especially when one person claims to see lavender while another argues that the color is actually lilac. Aside from the necessity of naming pigments and hues for color-matching purposes, perhaps many color names are best left to the imagination, where poetic expressiveness can assign the most appropriate color name for that particular purpose and moment.

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