Merry Crafts-mas
Once a month, I get together with a group of girlfriends for dinner, where we have a lovely time talking about our husbands and kids. (Sometimes you have to listen a while to figure out which is under discussion.) Every November, we draw names from a hat to determine whom we’ll shop for at Christmas. When we meet for our December dinner, we exchange the gifts. On the surface, this sounds like a wonderful idea. You only have to shop for one person, and no one goes home empty-handed, so it’s not at all like those miserable 5th grade Valentine’s Day parties when snotty Janine Crumpet got 37 valentines and you didn’t get any.
But some women (by which I mean, all the women I know) really like to shop. So the group decided to have an ornament exchange as well. Since we’re such good friends, we decided to make it the kind of free-for-all where you can steal someone else’s ornament rather than opening a new one. There are two problems with this kind of exchange. First, everyone wants to be the one to take home the popular ornament, the one hotly contested to the point of bickering and wine-tossing. I’m just kidding; we’d never waste wine that way. And second, if you’re really unlucky, you could end up going home with the same tacky thing that you brought. So you bring something amazing, partly to make sure that if you are stuck with it, you’ll like it, and partly because you want everyone to admire your cleverness and shopping prowess.
In order to expand our shopping opportunities, and increase the degree of difficulty in ornament selection, the group has decided that we can bring “any seasonal decor”. This little change has allowed us to bring flashing neon snowmen, real sterling silver bells to go on the tree, and live reindeer (I was so embarrassed when I brought a yak by mistake). Try hitting the Dollar Store for your ornament contribution after that!
Although shopping can be fun, the pressure to bring the best “seasonal decor” is becoming intense. To top it off, some of the ladies have begun bringing “just a little something” for everyone. If we all got cardboard snowman coasters I could handle it. But I’m talking crocheted mufflers! Hand painted ornaments! Imported Swiss snowballs! Pasta makers! Every year I accept these gifts from my friends, feeling smaller and smaller, because I did not plan ahead and bring a sleighful of fabulous homemade gifts. Last year, I swore that 2005 would be my year.
That was the year I was going to buy mirrors in decorative wooden frames, and hand paint the frames, or etch them, or even carve them, and wrap them up with fabulous ribbons, or maybe handmade yak-hair lace, and smile benevolently as I handed them out to the admiring throng.
But I forgot that I was planning to bring these marvelous hand-made gifts until two days before the dinner. I didn’t have time to acquire the necessary materials, or any skill in painting, etching, or carving. So I ran off to “Bob’s Craft Emporium and Glue-Gun Repair Shop” and began searching the shelves for some clever, crafty idea that I could steal and pass off as my own.
Maybe I should have gotten some more sleep the night before, or maybe that eggnog latte had actual rum in it, but here’s the brilliant idea I came up with: Shrinky-Dinks®! That fun, shrinkable plastic we all used as kids. Of course, for this group, I was going to have to go beyond your basic peace sign or cartoon character key chain. Instead, I would make intricate, lacey snowflakes, and hot-glue them to plastic 3x5 photo frames. I was sure my delicate, hand crafted works of art would elicit oohs and aahs of astonishment and admiration, and possibly extra gifts.
Hours later, after many mangled snowflakes and some imaginative swearing, I decided to make snowmen instead. Cutting out circles and drawing faces was more my speed. After a few tries, and a few more cups of wassail, I had the hang of it. These guys were lookin’ good, although the Holiday Spirits I had consumed may have had something to do with that opinion. Unfortunately, in the heat of the oven, one of the snowmen curled up so that his head touched his, uh, his bottom snowball. (I’ll bet you can’t do that!) Anyway, some of the color from his hat rubbed off onto his snowball, prompting my daughter to ask, “Who’s going to get the snowman with the dirty butt?” Of course I didn’t want to waste those exceptional snowflakes, or the dirty snowman, but I couldn’t give them away as gifts to real people. So, I glued all of them onto one frame for my sister. She won’t even need to put a photo in her frame. Happily, the rest of my finished snowman frames look almost good enough to sell at the Dollar Store.
