Pick your favorite pictures via voting

I have marked the change of seasons for the past several years by closing down one online photo gallery and opening a new one. As one season fades gently into the next, changing galleries this way feels abrupt and arbitrary. I always experience a twinge of nostalgia for the season just past and for the pictures that have documented how we spent it.

Pictures are memories made permanent. I hate consigning them to a virtual desk drawer just because they are a few months old.

The contributors don't seem to mind. They know that even if I say it's autumn, they can still send pictures of flowers blooming and children swimming, and any summery thing their cameras find. When I decree that Spring has arrived, they'll still send me pictures of snow if they get a chance to photograph any.

Usually I add new pictures to whatever the current gallery is, in the approximate order that they arrive. When the time comes to change galleries, I create a new link at the top of the Gallery index and move the old one down on the page, so that all of the old galleries are still accessible. As that virtual drawer fills up, the earlier galleries get buried deeper and deeper. I rummage through the drawer now and then, enjoying the old pictures anew, and I hope that you do too.

For this year's galleries, though, let's go a step farther. Rather than let the pictures drift into a mostly forgotten pile, we shall each month choose our favorite picture from the previous month. I'll get the Star staff to pick five, and you can vote on your favorite from that group. At the end of the year, we will create a calendar using the chosen photo from each month.

We will make the calendars available for sale, and the proceeds will go to The Star's Newspapers in Education program, which provides newspapers for classroom use in local schools.

We are nearing the end of January, so I have set up an online poll that you can use to vote on the five January pictures.

I also set up a December poll. We will need the entire month next December to print and sell the calendars, so we'll have to use pictures from December 2004.

You may vote in the December and January polls through Feb. 28, and I will open a new poll for February pictures on March 1.

The polls are in the Community section online, and the picture chosen each month will appear on the Community page of the newspaper. Instructions for submitting photos are in both places.

I think this will be fun. It will keep our favorite pictures in front of us for another year, and it will put newspapers in the hands of more of our children.