From the friendly caves of Pixie Hollow.

Take 1 cup of tallow at room temperature
Slaked with 1/4 cup of a lovely oil like olive or macadamia
Add calendula tincture and oil of lavender
Whiz it all together until it's homogenous
Then whip it! Whip it good!

Tallow can be made by chopping up a bunch of suet (which is cheaaap) and cooking it over a low heat for about five hours. Strain it through a fine sieve covered with muslin, and set it in the fridge. It's shelf-stable, fabulous for cooking, ointments, balms, lipsticks, candles... 

And its health benefits are immense.

You may not realise it, but seed oils are highly toxic to the body. Plus, the sheer level of resources required to harvest, crush, purify, bottle, and ship those oils is immense. Tallow you can render down from any grazing animal, so if you're partial to a bit of wild deer (as this Pixie truly is), then you may even get your tallow for free.

So why am I telling you this?

It's because many of the Old Ways of Doing Things are actually not that old.

Rendering tallow is something that my dad's parents and grandparents would do on a weekly basis. They'd use the fat from the roast, for example. Or from a sheep they'd killed.

And that wasn't even that long ago. Fifty, sixty years?  

Many of the methods deployed in digital content are lauded as being New and Whizzbang Things, using New and Fantabulous Technology.

But almost all of them come from an Old Way.

Writing emails is just writing direct mail.

Taxonomy is just creating a book index.

Solving distribution is just... solving distribution.

Which means that if you read books that feel ancient now (not hard for anything pre-1990 let's be honest), you're still learning incredibly valuable skills!

You can't deny that books talking about direct mail during the depression are just as valuable now as they came to be after the depression.

Yeah, look, there's social media and streaming and metaverses and all the rest of that jazz. But if you're honest with yourself, you'd realise:
1. that the rules of social media are just How to win friends and influence people
2. that the rules of engagement are just pulled from direct mail
3. that streaming is just TV and radio in another form
4. that the metaverse is still governed by behavioural psychology.

If the foregoing weren't true, then Nike wouldn't be selling shoes in the metaverse for tens of thousands of dollary-doos to idiots taken in by "rarity".

Nothing is what it seems.

So if you're thinking that you have to do something new in the new year, there's a good chance that actually you would be better off learning from something old.

xx Leticia "still reading direct mail from 1930" Mooney

PS. Two sleeps left until that creepy Elf goes back in the cupboard, darlings. Here's the deal:

1. Put yourself in my schedule for sometime in 2022.
2. Get 15% off all fees from 1 Jan until 31 March.
 
This deal applies to all of these, and more...

• Content writing
• Copywriting for your existing customers
• Technical writing
• Strategic communications consulting
• Content Strategy
• Content systems and audits
• Training, seminars and workshops
• Brand voice establishment
• ... and even the Epic 3 Case Studies + Bonuses Pack.

To get it, just hit reply and tell me what floats your boat. 

PPS. The deal expires at 23:59 Central Australian time on 24 December.