Dreaming of a Crafty Christmas

By Amy Coward

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The holiday season is here again and while I generally look forward to it, I also dread it.  Why, you say? Because I’m not crafty. During the holidays, non-crafty people should just hide until it’s all over.  It’s the crafty person’s time to shine and I’m just not one of them.

Just look around you. Seemingly everyone is posting pictures on Facebook of holiday projects that would make Martha Stewart feel ashamed. Wreaths that look like piano keys. Trees made out of garden hoses. Snowmen made of flower pots. Ideas are everywhere. You ask a neighbor where she got that amazing wreath on her door and she says, “Oh, that old thing? I made that last Saturday.”Or you go to a party and all the appetizers are made to look like Frosty or Santa. Honestly, I would never have thought to put grapes and strawberries on a toothpick in that order. I just don’t have the gene.

Just yesterday, my daughter and I attended a craft show – a huge exhibit hall filled with crafty people selling crafty things that looked like they ought to be in some exclusive gift catalog or store. I just couldn’t believe they MADE these things. Leather cut into flower necklaces, hammered metal bent into ear-rings, hand-painted notepaper…and they MADE the paper. I kind of hate these people. They were so willing to explain how simple it was to throw these things together. Or explain how they got their materials from recycled specialty magazines or how they got the idea when they traveled to Asia. It was just unbelievable. I wanted to look behind the curtain and find a small army of elves actually making the things they claimed to create just to make me feel better. But instead, I had to nod and say, “well isn’t that something!”

Now don’t get me wrong. I’ve tried a craft or two in my time. But if the saying “Pinterest Fail” sounds familiar, you’ll immediately know how it went.  It all starts when I see something online and think even I could do that. Off I go to the craft store and forty dollars later, I have supplies to recreate this item I simply must have. I spend the next several days working feverishly (and cursing occasionally) only to discover that my item looks nothing like the one in the photo. My projects never turn out display worthy. Even at those wine and paint parties, I’ve been known to trash my painting at the end of the night. And it had nothing to do with the wine.

I keep dreaming that one day my mailbox will be adorned with holiday greenery and beautiful bows. Or my cookie tray will look like a photo in Southern Living. Or my gifts to others will be hand-crafted items that you can’t believe I made out of pine straw and rocks. I’ll be the most envied crafter in the exhibit hall. But then I wake up and remember that it’s me we’re talking about and it’s just not happening. I’ll have to stick with buying such items from more gifted people.

So if you see me in the craft store with my arms loaded down with supplies, feel free to stop me right there. Dangle a beautifully decorated cookie in front of my face and lure me right out the door. That should get me through until next year. Or at least until Valentine’s Day.

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Amy Coward is a public relations professional in Columbia, SC. When she is not managing the madness of event planning at Palmetto Health Foundation, she is turning her empty nest upside down looking for fun and finding it. 

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