Ornaments

For Christmas last year I put lights in the front windows and hung ornaments around them for a sparkly effect. Because this wasn't necessarily Christmas-y and because we had no actual, shedding tree, I felt I could leave the decorations up until the light came back to us, whenever that might be. At the end of February I decided the days were no longer so short that I needed to plug in my   little white lights at 6:15 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.

 

As I removed the ornaments—some precious and breakable and with long histories, some precious and not breakable (like the gilded walnut shells that my friend Pohle-Linda made for the children when they were young)--I placed the fragile ones in various boxes, either the boxes in which they arrived or boxes that have accumulated for the purpose over the years.

 

One of the boxes is blue cardboard in the shape of an old-fashioned Chinese take-out box (before Styrofoam containers). You know the kind I mean: cleverly folded, with a wire handle inserted on each side. Well, it struck me that I could open out that box and use it as a template to make a couple of dozen similar boxes. To decorate my boxes I could watercolour them or rubber-stamp them, draw with oil pastels, paste on punched-out shapes—I could do whatever I wanted. Cutting and folding those dozens of boxes would give me a collection of identically sized containers for my Xmas ornaments, each one decorated as a one-of-a-kind masterpiece. I could, if I wanted to, label each one as to which ornament it contained. Or I could NOT label them and be surprised when I opened boxes at random the next year.

 

I truly believe there was a time in my life when I would have done this, just because it happened to pop into my mind. But here's what happens to such ideas: someone says,

Oh, I think that's a marvelous idea. Then you could sell them! You could start a little business and hire starving artists to do the decorating and sell them to Holt Renfrew or Lord & Taylor. Oh, this is SO exciting. You could make a fortune.

 

And if someone says that to me, then I have to say: my dear, I admire your enthusiasm, but I believe you've forgotten who it is you are talking to. I might conceivably, MAYbe, if I got really excited about it, make a few of these boxes—say, a dozen—for my most favourite, breakable ornaments. But to make a business of it? To hire other people to do the fun part? What would be in it for me if I did that? Except, if you are right, some money. But I would be left doing what I DON'T want to do (running a business) while others would be doing what I DO want to do (that's IF I want to do it in this case; I still haven't decided)—namely, the art part.

 

And then she would say, oh, of course. I forgot who I was talking to.

 

And that would be the end of that.

 

For last year, then, the idea of individually decorated Chinese take-out boxes was shelved, along with the ornaments, which I wrapped, more or less carefully, in tissue and layered into one big box labeled: "Ornaments—front windows."

 

But this is another year. The ornaments have not yet been retrieved from their basement home, but they will be soon. And perhaps this February, when I finally, reluctantly, remove them from public display, I will drop everything else for a week and devote my time to making decorated Chinese take-out boxes to store them in.

 

 

Copyright 2012 Ann Tudor

www.anntudor.ca
http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com