Hi Folks:

June 8 is a very special day for us, for several reasons. First, for the world in general, June 8 is World Ocean Day. Not only do the world’s oceans cover over 70% of the earth’s surface, but they hold 97% of the world’s water. Keeping our oceans healthy is vital in so many ways it would be impossible to begin to list them all.

Second, June 8 is the Anniversary of Marcia’s marriage proposal. Yes, it was 26 years ago, and after giving it due consideration (for less than half a second), of course Mike said yes. No fool he. We continue to feed each other every day.

And third, June 8, 2010 was the advent of our Free Hugs sessions in downtown Victoria. In 11 years we shared hugs with locals and tens of thousands of visitors to our fair city from (at least) 88 countries. Every hug is unique and special and we treasure each and every one of them. Our only rule was that we offered, but those who were interested had to come to us.

The illustrious Marcia, Free Hugs poster in hand, during our first Free Hugs session (image © A. Licht)

Because of Covid we did our last Free Hugs session on March 1, 2020. From there we went on to create hugging spaces in front of our house using sidewalk chalk (like this)

to encourage passers by to share hugs with each other. This year, due to some medical challenges, we aren’t able to do our chalk art for the nonce but we periodically put up posters on our fence post like this one:

In addition to all of the above, we continue to distribute Hug Certificates.

These are business card size, and we alternately leave them to be found and/or give them to people we feel would appreciate them. We have ours commercially printed, but if you’d like to print a few of your own you can find the template here. And yes, we will happily share hugs with anyone who offers one!

Remember to hug someone you love today. Or a stranger. Or, preferably, both!!

Hugs,
M&M