The Mosiman Crafty Christmas was snow joke

It began, as all great ideas do, with over-idealized notions of stream-lined simplicity and cost-cutting which would result, of course, in a love-inspired, meaningful gift destined to be a treasured family heirloom passed down through the generations. What would be created from an enthusiastic suggestion in Austin in August would be the answer to that question:  If you could save only one item from your burning house, what would it be?

"Crafty Christmas?" my husband said, scowling as he rolled my luggage to the van. "What does that mean, exactly?" 

"It means," our daughter Savannah told him, later on the phone, "that Mom and Lisa finally found a way to ruin Christmas."

Not true.

Sure, Lisa and I aren't exactly fond of receiving presents and tend to get very over-whelmed when facing the flood of festive bowed bestowed blessings beneath the tree, each one labeled with our name and ticking like a time-bomb. Even in August, we could feel the pressure building.

"We should keep it simple this year," someone said and the starter pistol went off before Savannah could get ahead of the pack. 

The rules were easy.

Make. A. Present.

Reluctantly...begrudgingly...resignedly...sacrificially...Brad asked what I had in mind.

Excitedly...short-sightedly...stupidly...I happily told him. "Remember when Sydney was kicking around
doing engraved wine bottle bottom coasters for the guest gifts for her wedding and we science-experimented it out for her and realized the logistics were too time-consuming and complicated?"

Brad nodded slowly before adding, "And dangerous."

I brushed his comment off.

"So, anyway, we are going to make an engraved wine bottle bottom ornament of everyone's dogs!"

"Interesting," my husband said quietly. He kept mum on the subject, hoping that I would forget this ridiculous idea, until one grim day in October, he watched me lug a half dozen empty wine bottles into the house.

We watched several Youtube tutorials. Made do with the wrong equipment. Improvised. Failed. Failed. Drew blood. Failed. Got burned. Failed. Discussed the short-comings in our relationship. Failed. Cast blame. Called each other names. And eventually ended up with three semi-workable wine bottle bottoms with edges so sharp they could double as those ninja throwing stars.

Brad ordered a special sander so that no one would accidentally die as a result of hanging up their ornament.

He also donned a special filtered mask designed to keep him from inhaling mircoscopic glass shards into his lungs. It didn't help his poor arms. "Maybe you should have worn a long-sleeved shirt," I observed helpfully. "Maybe you should have just left Christmas alone," he snapped, unnecessarily, at me.

We observed the final products.

Fire-scorched black. Misshapen. Hideous.

"You're going to etch the features of their dogs on these?" Brad asked.

I was beginning to have some doubts about the viability of my project.

"Ya think?" Brad said. "Now? NOW you are having doubts?" He paused to re-group. "Maybe we could tell them that these are artifacts that we recovered from our secret trip to Pompeii."

Funny.

But that idea led to our second ornament idea where we used resin to encase sea shells collected with our girls as well as some other special artifacts from our lives.

Oh. And, of course, for our second crafty gift: fabric paint.

Hypervigilant as the manager of the Mosiman sweatshop, Brad watched as I cranked out custom-made shirts over the course of three days. "This is SO much easier than buying gifts," Brad admitted as I bemoaned every little imperfection.

Finally finished, I could stop focusing on my own frustration long enough to feel bad about what I had done to my daughters. This was a nightmare. Crafty Christmas was a catastrophe. It wasn't simple. It wasn't stream-lined. What we might have saved in money had cost us in time and frustration (as well as physical and emotional injury).

Christmas arrived.

Sydney and Douglas had put together a wonderfully whimsical calendar of family photographs. Sydney, to let her true feelings about Crafty Christmas be known, exploited my penchant of taking sleepy-time pictures of my precious angels and made that the theme of the gift...kick-starting the year with me sprawled out on a lounge chair at Disney, konked out from heat and exhaustion. Very flattering.

Savannah and Lisa also went with my love of family pictures...magically personalizing the board game "Guess Who?" to include dozens of familiar faces. We played a ruckus round...virtually...that evening. Our version definitely veered from the conventional questions posed in the original game. Instead of "Is the person a girl?" we went with more passive-aggressive tactics such as "Is this person psychologically unstable?" or oddly-specific inquiries such as "Has this person ever kept Twizzlers or Tootsie Rolls in her backpack to keep Mom from giving up while hiking?"

We debriefed after Christmas was over and ultimately decided that, while well-intended, Crafty Christmas was ultimately more trouble than it was worth. Some of us (me and Lisa) still liked the idea of a theme and are brainstorming possible ideas for next year. A color? Travel/Around the world? First letter of name? Gift basket?

Not everyone is quite on board...yet. 

Some people like to wait until the holidays are right upon us before making a plan.

Not us! When it comes to concocting a Christmas gift-giving strategy, we feel that there is Noel time like the present.

 

A Holiday Script with Razor Sharp Wit

 "Do you shave your legs upward, in only one direction," I asked Erin as we watched our friend Tyler, dressed as a train conductor, battle his way heroically across the stage, fighting his way through imaginary, hurricane-forced Arctic winds while dodging an avalanched onslaught of very real cotton snowballs thrown with a school-year's worth of pent-up rage and frustration by behind-the-scenes staff members, "or," I continued, lobbing another snowball at Tyler's head, "do you shave up AND down in one continuous movement?" 

Ignoring the hundreds of screaming elementary students in the audience behind us, Erin paused, her arm raised, fist clenched around another snowball. Before she launched her missile, she stared off into space, considering my question as the Sugar-Plum Fairies tiptoed out on cue to further terrorize Tyler. "I just shave UP," she admitted, suppressing a giggle as our friend Eric leaped by, narrating each movement prior to execution. "I'm leaping," he shouted before vaulting off across the stage. "Leaping!" he'd yell again. Bounce. Bounce. 

"Why do you ask?" she wondered as we watched Dave, gamely trot onto the stage, clad from head to hoof in a reindeer outfit. "According to the manufacturer's directions," I informed her, as Dave lay prone on the floor, rigor-mortised legs rigidly pointing due north, "the razors were ergonomically designed to be pushed down the leg and then pulled up again in a continuous motion." Tyler was now pulling the blind, lame reindeer off the stage using his train car. I realized, in that moment, that Erin and I had inadvertently written a LOT of gratuitous violence and injury in our up-lifting holiday play. "Dave is only temporarily blinded," Erin reassured me when I whispered my concern. But we'd also cast him as an out-of-work, down-on-his-luck, missing person, uh, I mean reindeer, who gets yelled at when he's eventually discovered, when he's not pulling Santa's sleigh, he's cleaning bathrooms, and...at the triumphant end of the play, he's sent home to wash Santa's laundry.

Erin waved off my concern as she quickly researched her razor brand on her phone as Santa arrived on stage to the delight of the screaming students behind us. "By George, you're right!" Erin was heard to exclaim as Tyler balanced pulling his rail car past with his hands juggling the millions of props he needed ("A train conductor needs a whistle and a lantern," we'd insisted, "Plus it will hide the thousands of pages of witty dialog we wrote for you!")! Dave sidled by as Santa ho-ho-ho-ed his way across the stage. "How did those two get this job, anyway?" he asked Tyler, who glared at us before answering. "Who else is going to write and direct these things?" he muttered, before rolling his cart glumly away. 

Erin and I let out sighs of relief as our actors ambled away. No one could EVER know that it is the most fun EVER writing and directing plays that force our friends into uncomfortable and humiliating situations. Alone now, we high-five-ed. "Whew! That was a close shave," Erin grinned. "I wonder," she said with a wink when we were done laughing, "if the manufacturer's technique is meant for other body parts as well." I was busy picking up the littered stage floor at this point and stuffing the cotton orbs back in their holiday box. "I don't think anyone has the snow balls necessary to test it out," I teased. 

Weight for it: Feeling Spencer's "pane" over a broken window

 Obviously...when you find yourself in the midst of an emergency, the first name that pops into your head should be mine...as the person NOT to call should you find yourself in the midst of an emergency.

To be fair, Spencer did not exactly call me...I just happen to be a member of the group chat to whom she directed her Bat Signal. 

Nevertheless...I sprang into action, immediately grabbing a pair of my never-been-used (until now) pink, one-pound-weight dumbbells. I wonder why they're called that?

A little back story:

So...as it's told...the hero of our story was fueling up...nutritionally, energetically & motivationally...at her favorite morning drive-thru. Powering her window down to bravely extend her bare hand to accept the caffeine of the cosmos...the beverage that would bevy her courage, calm her nerves, kick-start her creativity, drown her sorrows, and push-start her patience...Spencer was stymied when the window...in the face of near-negative outdoor numbers...responded to her plea to push up with a resounding "NO!"

Faced (an icy, open-handed frozen slap) with a forty minute drive with a gaping driver's-side window, Spencer made some minute adjustments to her wardrobe (Apparently only her eyes were visible during the torturous journey) and put in a text to the 4th grade team. Oddly enough, it was not the first text that we've received requesting a tarp and some rope.

Little back story concluded:

After receiving Spencer's text, Katriel held one of our infamously-abbreviated, one-syllably-worded phone conversations.

Amy:  Tarp?

Katriel:  Got it.

Amy: Rope?

Katriel: You?

Amy: See ya in a minute.

Tossing duct tape and the weights in my bag, I rushed out the door, driving carefully through snowy conditions, to Katriel's house to pick her up for our long commute. She looked dubiously at the dumbbells. 

Soon enough, we rendez-vous-ed with Spencer. 

Katriel wielded the tarp like a matador's cape. The cavernous hole in Spencer's door was covered in no time. Spencer used the rope to lasso one of the side-view mirrors and the task was almost complete. I stood quietly to the side...watching the show with unmasked admiration. Glancing at me, Katriel shook her head before declaring wistfully, "If only we had something to weigh down the top of the tarp on the roof of Spencer's car." 

Brightening, I scurried off to get my bag,

Soon, my contribution to this little project was added like the cherry to a hot fudge sundae. Or the star to the top of a magnificently-decorated-to-resemble-the-corpse-of-someone-who'd-snitched-on-the mob Christmas tree.

I was just so proud to have been able to pull my weight.

Job done, three figures moved across the icy parking lot to enter the school:  Two trained professionals, competent in all areas and one dumbbell.