#CreativeChristmasCollab: in celebration of friendship and memes

Christmas is a time for coming together, celebrating friendship and playing video games. 2020 is no different despite its weirdness, and the lovely Chris Durston has put together an event to raise our festive spirits.

Chris’s aim for the #CreativeChristmasCollab is to make this year a little less strange by bringing the community here in our WordPress group closer together. Participating bloggers were asked to provide a link to one of their favourite posts and then, after he’d worked his Secret-Santa-style magic, write something nice about the person we’d been matched up with and their article. I can now reveal who I’ve been gifted for this collaboration: the lovely Ellen from Ace Asunder.

I laughed when I received Chris’s message and saw her name. You see, although Ellen and I have always been in the same blogging circles, we started getting to know each other properly about a year ago and now talk pretty much every day. We’ve joined forces to run several community-events together too, the most recent being this summer’s Great Blog Crawl, and it’s something we’re hoping we can bring back again for 2021 but in an even bigger and better format.

But she’s more than just ‘someone I know from blogging’. I now consider her to be a friend in real-life regardless of the fact we’re almost 3,000 miles apart, have never met in person and COVID-19 screwed up our plans to change that. The past several months have been tough for everyone and Ellen is always on hand to listen and give advice whenever I’ve needed it – as well as plenty of memes for those days where I’ve been stuck in eight conference calls in a row.

She’s also been there with a huge amount of support right from the start of our GameBlast21 plans. It’s thanks to her that our cat Zelda appeared in the promotional video for the event and the team received a lovely mention during one of SpecialEffect’s streams. We always look forward to completing gaming marathons for the charity, but we’re now even more hyped for next February and are looking forward to roping genniz0rz (Ellen’s Twitch name) in for a few games.

When Chris told me about his collaboration idea, I thought I’d take the subject of the article created by the person I’d been matched with and dedicate a post to them on the same topic. That’s difficult here though because, in a similar vein to Ellen’s The Legends of Twitch, I’ve already written about some of my favourite streamers from the community and shared this back in July. So instead, I’ve come up with something different to celebrate our friendship and I think she’s going to approve.

As mentioned above, she’s always there with a meme whenever you need one and we’ve sent so many to each other over the past months. Our favourite subjects seem to be cats, making it through the coronapocalypse or dealing with working in an office. Check out the gallery below to see some of the best, being mindful that a few of them contain strong language – and make sure you go visit Ellen at Ace Asunder and on Twitch.

#StrengthInSarcasm

Memes 2020 photo gallery

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We’re taking part in GameBlast21 to support SpecialEffect, the gamers’ charity.
Making a donation will bring you great loot, increase your XP by +100 and make you immune to fire.*
(*Not guaranteed.)