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.