Cardboard + Elmer's Glue + Cotton Balls + Magic Markers = Christmas

I just remembered that there was a period of life when Christmas did not involve buying gifts. You just got them. The only gifts that children are expected to give are the ones they make at school. (Some parents may put the kid's name on a gift, but that's about as honest as the latest "Robert Jordan" books.) 

Unfortunately, most of the ornaments I made in elementary school still find a way into the Christmas tree at my parents' house. I say unfortunately because they are atrocious. There's no nostalgia, or wonder, or even particularly fond memories associated with any of the haphazard clay monstrosities that bear my scrawled name on the back. There's a lumpen spearhead that's supposed to be a Christmas tree, shellacked in slimy green glaze with a round daub of brown at the bottom to represent some sort of Picasso-like deconstruction of the trunk. There's a frightening snow man who lacks glaze in the uneven gouges I made for buttons and eyes, who is colored a powder blue and looks more like a medieval torture victim's corpse than a jolly snow sculpture. There's a red felt wreath that surrounds my 7-year-old buck-toothed chipmunk face that's actually quite competent, but I seem to recall my second-grade teacher taking pity on the tacky mound of glue I created and "showing" me how to make the ornament, in the process doing it for me, so I could pass it off as my own. That was the same year I flat-out plagiarized a science paper on squids and got away with it. Everything I needed to know about leading an immoral academic life, I learned in second grade.

The Christmas "gift" ornament craft project I remember the most clearly is from much later, fifth grade I believe. We were old enough to use scissors. I think the teacher had just given up on imparting lessons, because we were set loose with as much colored construction paper as we needed and a big jug of cotton balls and a Tupperware container full of Elmer's glue bottles and told to make a jolly snow scene. 

Ever the rebel, I chose to make a Christmas stocking. Naturally, my warped scissoring job produced something a lot more like a capital "J" that had just spent the night in a gutter vomiting Wild Turkey than a sock, but that wasn't the memorable part. After messily affixing some mangled cotton to the top of the J for fringe, I grabbed a full set of Crayola markers to write "Merry Christmas" down the length of the stocking. I spelled "Merry" normally across the top in black, not quite leaving enough room so that the 'y' was jammed in underneath the roof of the second 'r'. I then had the brilliant artistic inspiration to alternate colors for "Christmas," which I would write one letter at a time down the length of the so-called stocking.

This time, I focused on planning space better. Knowing that "Christmas" is a long word, I wrote fairly modest-sized letters, and I didn't want to make a rainbow, so I set about coming up with the most randomized color pattern possible. I was getting pretty proud of myself as I scrawled the final two capital letters in the tip of the sock. There, it might not be a masterpiece, but it represented the very best of my artistic abilities, and it was something I could point to as a complete execution of my concept.

That's when I noticed I had written "Merry Christopher."

It's the only ornament I made that doesn't come out each year to hang on the tree. I believe it's in a storage box somewhere. Probably mingling with my various retarded watercolor finger paintings. (I use the word 'retarded' quite clinically there. My artistic skills are those of a four-year-old, provided the four-year-old is exceptionally untalented.)

The reason I recall this particular school project is that, as I have come of age and learned to accept that I am incorrigibly solipsistic, I've started to appreciate more and more than this one fleeting moment of confidence in my art-making skills led subconsciously to the invention of a goddamn holiday for myself. So Merry Christopher, everybody. Here's to taking life's lemons and making a giant pitcher of ego nog.