Friday, December 14, 2001

The Heck of Homespun Holidays

This holiday season we’re being urged to nestle down for a homespun holiday filled with homemade goodies and crafts. Martha Stewart 24 hours a day. For me, it’s just not a “good thing.”

However, my daughters are nuts for crafts—so every Christmas, I suck it up. A few years ago, our five-year old was seized with the desire to fashion her own nativity scene. We ventured to the arts and craft store where I found what I thought was a cheerful German kit of plaster figures that we could paint as we desired . Alas, when we opened the box at home, we found ourselves staring, open-mouthed, at a collection of obscene, tubular red rubber molds that could have appeared on the set of David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringer, and a large baggy of white powder. The horror in those pre-anthrax days was not of deadly illness, no, but of something pretty bad, nevertheless—the dawning realization that the German on the box we could not translate must actually say something like: “The Bürgermeister orders you to make of this messy powder the little molded figures for your creche. Warning! Figures crumble, break, and mock you when you un-mold them. We at Schtuppelhausen laugh at your pathetic struggle to make the figures seen in our heavily retouched photo.”

It all brings to mind the sad little story of an international student we knew, who once bought a can of what she thought, based on the package photo, was deliciously golden brown fried chicken. She hustled the can home, opened it . . . only to find herself staring incomprehensibly at an expanse of snowy lard—tricked by Crisco.

We faired better than that hungry student, eventually. We did manage to eke out the holy family and a few lumpy animals from our plaster powder, and apply the meager paints in order to produce a fetching aubergine-fleshed shepherd and a Mary who suffers from a touch of scarlet fever, poor dear. Now, a good two years later, we’ve performed the final step—shellacking on only one figure. Once our little artist got into the shellacking business with Joseph she had a hard time calling it quits, and now Joseph gleams and shines like a well-slicked Elvis in a high sweat on a Las Vegas stage, while the other chalky figures cower behind him like pensive ghosts.

Fortunately, the production of our nativity scene only had to happen once. The craft project I must steel myself for every single year is my daughters’ favorite, and my own special torment—the gingerbread house. When I’m in the midst of the long process, I cry out for a better circle of hell, envying Dante’s panderers, usurers, and hypocrites their fates as I lurch about the kitchen, hands coated in sticky dough, drips of royal icing slowly immobilizing my limbs. By the time I’ve spent several grumpy days propping up the collapsing cookie walls with heavy books while the icing slowly does its gluey job, all I want to do is paddle around, hiccuping, in a pool of nice, rummy eggnog.

By now, you must be thinking my theme song goes something like, [music - “You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch . . . “—record scratch] BUT, wait! Watching my daughters decorate the house (which, some years, looks more like a haunted lean-to) with piles of peppermints and red hots and gum drops, all the while singing along to Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” - well, it does my cramped heart good. (Here’s the part where my little Grinchy heart grows three sizes that day.[ boing!]). And on display, I must admit our gingerbread house looks festive, smells fabulous, and is a popular attraction for all manner of beasts. Last year, I found our new kitty delicately licking the peppermint doorknob. I shoed her away, and an hour later found our three-year-old daughter furtively tippy-toeing up to lick the very same sticky spiral. Ah, the taste of the holidays.

But this year, perhaps under the influence of those GAP commercials on TV—all that groovy acoustic music urging me to “Give a little bit of my love”—I’m voluntarily participating in a few homey crafts. And, you know, they needn’t be so hellaciously taxing. I’m surprised at how much pleasure I’ve gotten out of a gift last year from an 8 year old friend—a bit of calico cloth stuffed with whole cloves and tied with a satin ribbon to put in my dresser drawer. (On difficult mornings, it’s a comfort to put on socks that smell like pie.) And while in a Venn diagram, my little circle would never socialize with Martha Stewart’s, I did come across a brilliant and easy idea of hers – filling a long cotton sock with dry lentils (Like so . . . [sound]) to make a neck warmer you can heat in the microwave (only two minutes, or your neck will smell of scorched soup). Hang it around the back of your neck as you tuck into your evening novel. A welcome bit of heaven to balance the heck of other holiday tasks. Why, it’s enough to make even a Grinch sing “Fah Who Foraze, Dah Who Doraze, Welcome Christmas! Come this way!” [Music rises]

For “Michiana Chronicles,"with a festive sock of lentils tossed about my neck, this is April Lidinsky.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on December 14, 2001
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