For some reason, although I have not devoted one iota of thought to holiday shopping, and I break out in hives every time a relative asks me about plans for my daughter's December birthday, I have found myself thinking about the gifts my sister and I started making around this time of year in our basement craft room.
My mother turned half of our large basement into a craft room for us when we were around seven and eight. She cleared the space, put a large, old, oak table in the middle of it, and lined the walls with shelves that held every imaginable type of craft material: art supplies, fabric, beads, clay, Styrofoam, rocks, shells, doilies, pipe cleaners and much, much more. My sister and I would spend hours down there, "working." She gave us a big cardboard, under-the-bed storage box and we turned it into Boston's Colonial Theater, complete with stage set with a scene from the production of "Annie" that had recently hypnotized us. There were rows of tiny seats with little pipe cleaner people sitting in them. It had curtains. I have rarely been as proud of a creation.
But each year, what we really looked forward to about the craft room was the holiday gift-making bonanza. Like many children with socially conscious parents we had been raised to believe that there was nothing better, more special, than a homemade gift. We took this with a grain of salt, while understanding the principle. We believed that it was more appropriately, should we say, applied to the gifts we made for others, not so necessarily those that we received.
It didn't start on such a large scale, but after a few years, our gift-making operation had grown out of control. We were making gifts for our immediate family, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, great aunts and uncles, second cousins and first cousins once removed. I kid you not. As the gifts were finished, they were accounted for and filed on a shelf or in the drawers of the table. There were lots of rock paperweights, painted or with alphabet noodle messages or names glued on. There were paintings, and pencil holder cups, and lipstick holders, and doll clothes and pots with lids--if someone had told us we had to make gifts for all of Middlesex County, I feel as though we would have looked at each other, stood straight, and asked: By when?
I'm not sure why I'm thinking about this now. It may be because the holidays, although I am fighting them away with a stick, are looming. It may be because I am dissatisfied with the play room I set up for my girls and know it needs more creative oomph. Or it may be neither, just that I am remember wistfully, fondly, the days when my sense of industry could be so easily and purposefully fulfilled.
2 comments:
Funny, I've been thinking lately about Billy Collins' poem "The Lanyard." Do you know it? My father-in-law was talking about painted rocks as Christmas presents, which is what first brought it to mind, and your blog today reminded me of it again.
And thanks for the one before it, too. It made be breathe and smile about politics for the first time since the day after the election. Which I guess is just yesterday, but what a long ago yesterday it seems. I remember Obama's speech, too. I remember his intelligence and his very contemporary inclusiveness that seemed utterly authentic to him, core to his beliefs and his self, as it would be. It's about time!!
I remember your downstairs craft room. But I couldn't stand up in it, too tall even then. I also remember those barrettes that you two use to make and for a short, but preppy time, it seemed all the cool girls were wearing them.
Don't feel you have to give your kids the exact same opportunities that you had. I know your kids have had many different and great opportunities, that non-of us Sudbury kids did at their age. Just give them as much choice and support them in their passions, however fleeting they maybe.
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