What was as soon as a Star Wars joke is a totally armed and operational merchandising occasion. Today is Life Day, which implies that from its theme parks to its shops, Disney will discover a option to promote you as many Wookiee-affiliated items of merchandise as potential: particularly these pale blue orbs. But what had been they even for? Have we forgotten what Life Day was about within the first place?

First established within the notorious Star Wars Holiday Special—therefore its many years as a derogatory in-joke, a reminder of probably the most routinely clowned-upon items of Star Wars media ever made—Life Day is pitched as a Wookiee hybrid of Thanksgiving and Christmas. There’s a tree, there’s household gatherings, there’s shiny decorations, a lot of waffling about love and concord. There’s additionally, appropriately, a spiritual origin that has more and more been pushed apart in favor of a non-secular, exploitably merchandisable business occasion. Life Day Funko Pop, anybody?

The Life Day Orb is arguably essentially the most basically spiritual side of Life Day in Wookiee tradition. The vacation is one in all celebration, like our personal Christmas and Thanksgivings, but it surely’s primarily one in all remembrance—a time to replicate on those that have already handed on as a lot as it’s celebrating the dwelling within the right here and now. In each the Expanded Universe and Disney’s present canon, the Life Day Orb is supposed to replicate a starscape that Wookiees imagine to be the afterlife, a part of a perception system that includes the spirits of departed life strolling on into the celebs themselves. Aside from adorning the wroshyr bushes of Kashyyyk throughout festivities, Life Orbs are the middle of household gatherings, each as ornament and the crux of prayer rituals by Wookiee households, a silent pause to recollect misplaced love ones.

It’s maybe becoming then that the Orb is the straightforward window to a world of Life Day merchandise. It’s a bauble, it’s a mug, it’s a light-up globe. It’s adorned on t-shirts, common on plush toys, and offers photo opportunities at Disney’s Star Wars land, Galaxy’s Edge. Perhaps much more so than the purple conventional robes of Life Day (now available as loungewear!), the Life Day Orb is the image of the vacation as a company product. And if we’re going to make Life Day as a lot of a vacation as Christmas, there’s most likely nothing higher than taking one in all its most religious points and having the engines of capitalism flip it right into a filed down trinket. Happy Life Day!

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