As hoped, my wife and I and two friends and their two kids (11 and 13) performed the Evoloterra ceremony last Saturday evening in celebration of the 44th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing and Neil Armstrong’s famous small step/giant leap onto the Moon. We all enjoyed it greatly.

We had not told our friends, who are not space activists by any means, about it when we invited them over for dinner. So they were quite surprised and nonplussed initially but really got into it after the first round of the reading. It was fairly late when we got started and they were really hungry but everyone wanted to go through the entire ceremony as instructed rather than taking a break midway.

(Our friends later pointed us to a video taken with a smartphone of their son reading one of the passages. He did a fine job but I better not post it here, though, lest he punch me the next time I see him.)

We followed the instructions fairly closely. Didn’t have enough long candles in holders for everyone so we used our small Ikea cup candles. The kids toasted with cranberry juice rather than wine. We used herring and sunflower seeds for the symbolic edibles.  I wanted to use Mini-MoonPies to make the infinity sign desserts but Kerima went to two stores and couldn’t find them, mini or otherwise. (Guess they are a Southern thing.) So we used pairs of cookies instead.

Some minature space men joined us for the ceremony.

Don’t see us doing the ceremony every year but definitely hope to do it again. Highly recommend it for everyone.