Way before DIY channels were a thing, we made our own holiday ornaments, partly from necessity. Some of us still do just for the fun of it.
Pardon the Boomer nostalgia, but back in the day, before becoming enrapt with hand-held screens and being reduced to our thumbs being our only moving parts, we kids were told to go outside and forage for entertainment – and don’t come back till dark.
So naturally, with Daylight Saving Time cooping us up indoors after school, and only three black-and-white channels (IYKYK), we “made do” with whatever we could. Luckily my creative mom, who feigned being tireless while keeping four restless kids occupied during wintery evenings, had us doing crafts.
What we made wasn’t great, mind you, but like Rumpelstiltskin weaving golden garments from common straw, we coaxed cheap materials into everything imaginable: Pressed leaves, tin-can birdhouses and birdseed pinecones, wind chimes, whirligigs, painted clay pots, wooden clothespin butterflies, original holiday cards, and whimsical musical instruments from cardboard tubes. We went through sheafs of colorful craft paper, pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks, paper straws, pebbles, paper plates, jute string, ribbons, and buttons. And gallons of white glue and cheap paint, and, in those pre-environmental days, colorful glitter. I suspect some of that glitter is still floating around.
The most fun, or at least the ones I remember most fondly, were ornaments specific to this festive season, which we used to decorate our small, hauled-from-the-woods Christmas tree. We did the usual hard-tack flour-and-salt cookie ornaments and garlands of chains made from glued rings of colorful strips of craft paper, but the best was when Mom would have us forage for whatever materials we could scavenge from both our yard and across the street in my great-grandmother’s naturalistic garden.
Think acorns, pinecones, long thin trumpet creeper seedpods, little wild gourds, pecans, colorful bits of lichens, shiny green magnolia leaves and carefully snipped bits of holly, and sprigs of berries. We painted long, skinny Santa faces on dried okra pods and made other-worldly stars from sweetgum balls with toothpicks glued into the seed holes and painted cheerily.
Inspired by these fond memories, I recently set about making some nature-craft ornaments along these lines, which involved a lot of suspicious-looking walking around the neighborhood looking for fodder, and risking my mental health trekking to a hobby store for supplies.
First thing up was a gumball tree from a twiggy branch off a thorny shrub – in my case a hardy citrus tree, but a twiggy crape myrtle branch would work – stood up in a pot, with the stickers festooned with colorful real gumdrops. Then I started gluing twigs into little trees and stars, and wove mini wreaths from vines and berries, sprinkled glitter over drops and lines of glue squeezed onto magnolia leaves, and stuck tiny pinecones, acorns, and frilly lichens onto everything with a hot glue gun.
It was that latter trick that led to a painful lisp. Not-so-funnily, my inexperience with the glue gun led me to accidentally get a dab of molten glop on a finger, which I instinctively put in my mouth to cool. And it touched my procheilon – that little fleshy bump some of us have on the bottom middle of our upper lip – which promptly stuck fast onto my glued fingertip.
I couldn’t sip hot coffee for days but could still smile at my retro-rustic creations.
Anyway, what I remember as a nostalgic throw-back to the not-so-glorious days of my youth, has become this cold month’s garden quest. It’s been quietly satisfying, but yeah, I’m already regretting the glitter.
Felder Rushing is a Mississippi author, columnist, and host of the “Gestalt Gardener” on MPB Think Radio. Email gardening questions to rushingfelder@yahoo.com.
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