Lemon Week
After Future Day, Lemon Week is the most important holiday in House Collins’ calendar. This is a mid-May holiday designed to impart one of our most important cultural values: That of honestly engaging with ideas and arguments that feel offensive.
Offense is an emotion you feel when an idea credibly challenges your worldview and is therefore a great flag for things worthy of deeper investigation. If, for example, you are very openly frugal and someone accuses you of being miserly, you won’t feel offended because that accusation doesn’t challenge your self-perception (you already see yourself as tightfisted). If, on the other hand, you see yourself as a very generous and non-materialistic person and someone accuses you of being miserly, you will feel offended if you harbor any subconscious doubts that you really are doing enough. If, however, you truly don’t doubt your generosity, you won’t feel offended and instead will see the insult as silly (like someone accusing a very obviously skinny person of being fat).
The same dynamic holds for ideological concepts, be they related to theology, sex, politics, or climate change. If you are totally convinced it is moral to eat meat, you may bristle with annoyance or anger upon being called immoral as you tuck in to a nice, juicy steak—but you won’t feel offended. You will only feel offended by claims that meat eating is immoral if you both eat meat and don’t feel entirely comfortable with the morality around it.
While a person might scare you with their discordant worldview (as their agenda may threaten your own), you will only find their stance offensive if your own worldview stands on shaky ground. Offense is an emotion only felt in the face of a perspective that is a credible challenge to your world view.
Almost every dangerous viral memetic package evolves mechanisms that force the infected victim to regard offense as being equivalent to a direct personal attack. Once a cultural virus begins to infect a person, anything that might challenge it will instantly trigger feelings of offense. As such, successful cultural viruses train people to dehumanize anyone who triggers feelings of offense and reactively attack them, as doing so keeps the mind of the host under lock and key.
While we hope that our kids will be able to maintain the memetic package our family conveys to them, we actively want our House to change course if it is in some way genuinely wrong. To ensure this, we created Lemon Week.
Part One: Choose Your Lemon
Lemon Week starts with a family meal over which each family member is expected to share a chosen ideology that offends them. Over the course of the week, each family member performs a deep dive on that topic, engaging with it as honestly and openly as they can (while nevertheless taking a critical and rational eye to claims made).
Participants exploring offensive groups are expected not just to read up on their ideologies, but also consume their media. This may entail:
- Reviewing the social media feeds and content of major influencers in an offensive group’s community
- Exploring the top content of all time and the past year in subreddits and other forums associated with an offensive topic
- Interviewing open adherents about their worldviews and opinions
This does not have to be a cumbersome task. All that might be needed for one person to really understand the arguments behind an offensive topic or community could be two hours’ worth of YouTube videos and podcast interviews consumed while riding public transport to and from school or work. That said, family members won’t be discouraged from creating ancillary materials, blog posts, guides, interview series, or other recorded deep dives into the offensive topics they explore, especially if creating these materials helps them in their personal exploration.
Part Two: Steelman Your Lemon
At the end of the week, the family convenes over another special meal to share their findings. As each family member explains the arguments and logic behind the offensive ideology, group, or concept they explored, they are expected to steelman it.
Steelmanning involves presenting the most compelling argument possible and is the opposite of a straw man argument (in which one presents a fairly weak and easy-to-defeat argument—e.g. “Group X believes thing Y because they’re stupid/racist/homophobic/evil/etc.”). Per Lemon Week tradition, someone who strawmans their offensive view or who even fails to steelman it well is seen as not investigating it in good faith and therefore not upholding the House’s morality (for per our values, if we’re wrong about something, we want to find out and charge our minds).
Participating families (who also have land that permits this element of the holiday) also plant a fruit-bearing tree so everyone can, in the future, pick tasty snacks from every year’s tree and be reminded of the ideas with which they engaged (literally tasting the fruit of their labor). Families constrained to smaller residences and urban apartments and condos may modify this tradition by maintaining a fruit tree in their homes (such as a lemon tree).
Should a family member present an offensive concept that turns out to have genuine merit in a way that suggests that House doctrine should be changed in some way, the family will embark on a larger discussion about whether and how to update the House’s official ideology given their now-updated stance and make changes to House canon accordingly.
Holiday Aesthetics
- Lemons: Lemon wreaths, lemon towers, lemon topiaries, bowls of lemons, and other lemon-themed arrangements emphasize the theme of bitter-and-tart-but-useful (and potentially tasty!) things.
- Yellow and white: Beyond riffing on the color of lemons, the color scheme for this holiday is meant to make the tough subject matter more approachable (yellow, for example, is associated with cheerfulness and light colors in general are associated with positive emotions)[[85]](#_ftn85) and to emphasize the purity of truth over tribal affiliation (with white being associated with purity).[[86]](#_ftn86)
- Fruit trees: Before being planted or mixed permanently into a family’s home, Lemon Week fruit trees may be decorated and placed in a prominent space as decoration. In addition, if the family has indoor lemon trees (the only way to grow them if you live in the top half of the U.S.) these are placed as decoration on or near the dining table.
Holiday Foods
- Lemon Week features dishes leveraging lemon in some way (savory courses leveraging lemon zest or lemon juice, desserts like lemon tarts, lemon cakes, lemon custards, and lemon meringue pies).
- Lemon Week may also feature dishes that use fruits from previous years’ Lemon Week fruit-bearing trees, to remind families of previous offensive concepts explored.
Objectives Behind the Holiday’s Design
- In addition to being highly symbolic (in their bitterness and utility), lemons are abundant, inexpensive, and commonly used as a decorating element, which makes them easy to use as holiday decorations.
- In a manner similar to Rejection Day, this holiday is designed to take something intimidating (the exploration of offensive concepts) and turn it into a fun, intellectual puzzle for the whole family by facilitating bold but logical approaches that are openly shared and discussed.
- Because Lemon Day creates a routine process through which House cultures can be updated (in the event a family finds their prior stance to be genuinely wrong in the face of offensive information that has been carefully explored), the holiday also plays a crucial role in ensuring that cultures evolve when presented with new and improved information.