Despite completely abandoning my Saturday blog posts (and without even a note saying goodbye, tsk tsk), December was a creative month for me. It was also an insanely-busy-but-don’t-get-caught-in-the-holiday-stress-and-modern-day-grinchyness sort of month. I relied on creativity to keep focused on the real reason for the season, which isn’t Christ for me, or presents, but PRESENCE, the reminder of how abundant life is even at the most barren time of the year, the hope for the sun’s imminent return, the love that is in our hearts! All that good ol’ paganism!
So here’s a brief look at some of my creative endeavors to make the season bright:
My partner and I don’t own hardly any holiday decorations, and so every year we deck our place out with one of the most affordable options: paper snowflakes! Brian does about one or two, and I do about thirty. It’s good fun and definitely adds some pizzaz to our plain walls.
I also taped up Christmas cards over our never-been-used fireplace and decorated our spiral staircase with lights to make it: the CHRISTMAS POLE!
Brian’s first “snowflake” somehow morphed itself into a creature that is and will now always be hanging on our wall because it’s so cool looking and I think it would be sacrilegious to move:
For the packages I sent out this year, I decided to go super eco-friendly and simple: brown butcher paper and potato stamps. I told everyone about potato stamps like it was a new invention, and everyone told me how yea, they’d made those in kindergarten… still, I loved this project! I used a beet and some metallic paint as the ink (though I failed to document how the metallic stamps came out, trust me, they were beauteous!).
My other big creative project was watercoloring my mother’s Christmas card, but since I failed to take any photos of it before mailing it off, you’ll just have to once again take my word for it: it was pretty dope. And painting tiny red birds is very difficult.
Lastly, since Brian and I don’t have a tree and don’t deal with getting one, some years I don’t get to decorate one at all. But when we went to celebrate with Brian’s parents they were nice enough to leave the decorating honor to me (though it palls in comparison to Claire’s tree-topper):
It was a wonderful, busy, rambunctious family-filled, blissful holiday season, and here’s a cheers to you and the new year!
Compulsive Creation 