Art and About
Engaging with the creative force in everyday life

My daughter’s preschool shares a building with an adult day care facility. The children get together with the “grandmas and grandpas” across the hall for holidays and special occasions. The children usually sing songs and the adults usually applaud appreciatively. One of the reasons we chose this preschool is for this kind of intergenerational interaction.

The tradition during the Christmas season is for the two groups to come together to sing carols. This tradition was honored earlier in December this year. When I arrived to pick up my daughter on Monday, I was surprised to see a note on the door from the teacher that the children were once again singing for the grandmas and grandpas and they would be returning to the classroom shortly. I went inside to stay warm and caught the first wave of preschoolers running back to class. With twinkling eyes and beaming smiles, they held up small red satin stockings and exclaimed, “Look what they gave us!” At first glance, the stockings looked nice enough and I gave a rather pat, “Wow! Neat!” before asking if they had a good time. “A really good time!” one boy answered.

It wasn’t until my four-and-a-half year old, Allyndreth, and I were walking to the car that she held the stocking up as close to my face as she could and said, “Look! My name!” In green letters, someone who knows their way with an embroidery needle had beautifully stitched on her name. That kind of personalized attention put into a gift truly is exciting, especially these days.

I had to reflect on an article my husband told me about in last week’s paper, talking about people who re-finance their homes so they can pay for Christmas gifts. I know credit debt in this country is astounding on any given day, but astronomical during the holidays. I know there are people in my life who sigh about not having the money to give gifts. I know that it is easy to fall prey to the temptation of wanting to show the people we love how much we love them with monetary gifts. Frankly, this is a pretty lazy way to approach gift giving and not very imaginative. Your pocket book may be poor, but your imagination is rich. If a class of preschoolers can get excited about a little stitchery from an acquaintance, then think how your loved ones would feel with a little handmade something from you. You were born with the gift of imagination. Now, use it!

The following list is far from imaginative, but it might get our brains re-programmed to the significance of small, personal gifts. This is not Martha Stewart stuff, folks. This is basic, pure, from-my-heart-to-yours stuff that anyone can do.

Pick a flower, a sprig of holly, or an evergreen branch, tie a ribbon on it and attached a homemade card. Not a fancy, specialty scissors and doodads card but a piece of paper, folded in half with your handwriting on it.

Make a plain-old handmade card with some special words about the person and a holiday greeting.

Bake cookies. Maybe attach the recipe. Draw squiggles around the recipe card or computer printout to put your personal stamp on the gift.

For the more skilled person, stitch someone’s name on a store-bought holiday trinket, like a red satin stocking. For the less skilled, write the name in colorful sharpie in your best cursive handwriting. Stick a candy inside.

Take a photo of something beautiful or a photo of your loved one. Make a paper frame, decorated however you want, and give it to them.

Think about the kids of gifts you used to make in school for your parents and grandparents. If you have children now, think about the kinds of gifts you encourage them to make for relatives. If you do these same projects as an adult and give them to your friends and family, I guarantee they will be appreciated. I also guarantee that they will be remembered long beyond the memory of the monetary gift item.

Open your eyes to the little things around you that could become inspired gift ideas and let the brainstorming begin. Instead of budgeting money, budget time. And it doesn’t even have to be that much time. Don’t we all like to hear when someone says they’ve been thinking of us? We don’t ask, “How long were you thinking of me? A minute? An hour? A day?” It really is the thought that counts.

I wish you all a thoughtful holiday season!

Simple Gifts
by Shaker Elder Joseph Brackett, Jr. (1848)

‘Tis the gift to be simple,
‘Tis the gift to be free,
‘Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
It will be in the valley of love and delight.

Refrain:

When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed.
To turn, turn will be our delight,
‘Til by turning, turning we come round right

‘Tis the gift to be loved and that love to return,
‘Tis the gift to be taught and a richer gift to learn,
And when we expect of others what we try to live each day,
Then we’ll all live together and we’ll all learn to say,

Refrain:

‘Tis the gift to have friends and a true friend to be,
‘Tis the gift to think of others not to only think of “me”,
And when we hear what others really think and really feel,
Then we’ll all live together with a love that is real.

Refrain:

In this season of red and green, I find myself in a Green quandary. It all began when I was watching HGTV’s “What’s Up With That Decked Out Christmas House,” in which the host visits homes all over the country lit to the hilt with Christmas lights. At each house, the homeowner discussed their energy bill for December, and often it was significantly higher than for any other month of the year. One man even had the power company come and install thicker lines to his house to accommodate the December power consumption. My initial reaction to this was laughter and head shaking over their economic choices, followed by distress that these people would rather waste energy and destroy the earth than do something for the good of the planet.

Some folks had chosen to decorate in LEDs (light emitting diodes). The energy savings was astounding, but it led me to thinking about the artistry of this endeavor. An LED may be “good” by allowing a lighting artist to express themselves without ruining their pocket books or feeding the insatiable fossil fuel beast, but the look of an LED display is very different from the look of an incandescent light display. If a holiday lights artist can share their inner voice via LEDs, then more power to them. But what if incandescent lighting is what another person needs to illuminate his point of view?

Honestly, if this were completely an aesthetic discussion, I would solidly come down on the side of incandescent lighting. To me, it is brighter, more colorful, more dramatic, more magical and flat-out more Christmassy. There is one house in my neighborhood that has chosen LEDs. I pass that home and admire their choices, but I don’t have any emotional reaction to the lights. It almost seems to me that if you are going to go to LEDs, you might as well do no lights. It’s a halfway compromise that isn’t worth making, in my opinion.

I respond to the homes with the incandescent displays, and if we got around to putting up house lights this year that is what ours would be. But in an age of global warming and excessive consumerism and waste, I can’t put lights up anymore without guilt, and I don’t allow myself to completely enjoy the incandescent displays of others. This is one artform that, for me, is a tug of war between the emotional and the intellectual. I know in my head we should all be enjoying our compact fluorescents and LEDs this holiday season. I know in my heart that one of the joys of these darkest days of the year is to see the holiday lights start to pop up around town. To me, they are symbolic of the hope, joy, love, peace and faith that inform the celebrations of late December. They are our electrical metaphors of the light we are awaiting with the new life of spring, the birth of a child, the end of a string of bad luck, the return home of a loved one, the restoration of health, or anything else for which we may be holding vigil.

The featured lighting artists on the HGTV program all planned their displays for months, and spent another month or two installing them every year. This doesn’t include the time is takes to dismantle the display in January. In other words, this is the artistic medium these individuals choose to work in and a large amount of mental energy and free time goes into realizing their visions. They all express joy about doing the lights. Most of them may err on the side of too gaudy for my taste, but I will defend their artistry to the end because they have taken the time to share their imagination with the rest of us. In a perfect world, it wouldn’t matter if their imaginations glowed incandescent or not. But this is not a perfect world, and that is the problem.

Lectures from my arts education background keep popping into my head — learning how to be creative on a budget, finding a way to express yourself using what you have instead of what you want, executing an idea within certain parameters. Holiday lighting artists could impose upon themselves to use only LEDs, and find a way to satisfy their artistic drive using those. An artist who insists on using incandescent could challenge himself to make a splash using fewer lights, rather than attract attention based on sheer quantity. I’m sure the collective creative minds of humanity could arrive at myriad Greener solutions. Would these solutions be emotionally satisfying? For some of us, probably not.

There was a time when film artists mourned the death of silent movies because the public was ready and eager to make the transition to sound. Art behaves as a living organism, changing and adapting through time as is required and necessary to keep it alive. The time of the incandescent dinosaur may be drawing to a close. If that’s necessary to keep the world turning for my great-great-great-great-great grandchildren, then that’s enough for me to start forging an emotional connection with the Greener approach to holiday lights.

O magnum mysterium
et admirabile sacramentum,
ut animalia viderent Dominum
natum jacentem in praesepio.

Beata Virga, cujus viscera
meruerunt portare Dominum
Jesum Christum.

The text of “O Magnum Mysterium” has crossed my path a few times in the 31 years I have been singing in choirs. The translation reads:

O great mystery
and wondrous sacrament,
that animals should see the new-born Lord
lying in their manger.

Blessed is the Virgin whose womb
was worthy to bear the Lord
Jesus Christ.

Although I often work with directors who insist we understand the words we are saying, no matter what language we sing in, I hadn’t given this text much thought beyond a simple word-for-word translation. My current choir is preparing a setting of this text by César Alejandro Carrillo for our upcoming Christmas concert and our director, speaking with the awe and wonder worthy of a great mystery, reflected on how truly extraordinary it was that a god made flesh would first be seen by animals. By animals!

I was raised in the Christian tradition so I don’t remember a time I couldn’t recite the story of Mary and Joseph coming to Bethlehem and finding no room in the inn so Mary had to deliver the baby Jesus in a stable. As a child, I accepted the story. As an adult, I see some feasibility issues and a tremendous willingness on the listener’s part to leap into a serious state of suspension of disbelief. As a storyteller, I have to admire the high drama produced by the contrast of having a long-awaited messiah make his worldly appearance in a stable. It’s a story that keeps the crowds coming back for more generation after generation.

I’ve always imagined the stable and hay, the holy family, the shepherds and the three wise men, but I haven’t devoted a lot of brain cells to the animals. They weren’t blind and deaf. They surely reacted to the interruption of their evening stable-time when these two humans showed up and delivered a baby. They were the only witnesses to the birth. That is truly wondrous.

Whether you look at the story as myth, as fact, or as metaphor, the basic concept of a god appearing to animals first is unusual to a Euro-centrist culture. So unusual, that I think it is downplayed most of the time until you look at a text like “O Magnum Mysterium.”

This week we are decorating our house for Christmas and I spent several hours assembling 21 crèches that I was given by my mother. It is her collection, for which she has no space in her new home, so she unloaded a trunk full of boxes on my doorstep last year. I was honored since I used to love setting up the collection every Christmas season when I was growing up. The crèches are from a multitude of cultures, all hand-made and fairly unique, if you’re used to the one that people light up on their lawns at this time of year. They all have the basic players of Mary, Joseph and Jesus. Usually there is a shepherd, sometimes an angel, most of the time the 3 kings are part of the set. A few have a stable backdrop.

All but two of these crèches have animals. The two crèches from African nations have more animals per capita than the ones from Peru, Mexico, nations in Asia or countries of Europe. Since the artists of each crèche give their work the flavor of their heritage, I began to think about the direct relationship between animals and humans as represented in the respective artistry of each ethnic point of view.

I like to set up the crèches, but it is time consuming and I admit that over the years, I have fallen into a pattern for each vignette — the family in the center with the three kings off to the left, a shepherd off to the right (often near a symbolic sheep or two) and if there is an angel, it goes slightly behind the scene, looking on. If there are animals, I usually scatter them about in the background, minding their own business.

This year, though, the abundance of animals in the African crèches made me reconsider my plan. I started to give the animals more and more prominence as I arranged the scene. I put them closer and closer to the manger, putting them in the middle of the action, gazing at the wondrous sight. With each crèche, I strove to bring the viewers attention to the fact that the animals are also key players in this rather bizarre tale. I re-imagined the scene as many ways as I could. I call this year’s installation, “The Cattle are Lowing.”

It’s nice to recognize that even at age 35, the wonders of Christmas still abound.

Some traditions are passed down through the generations. Other traditions are intentionally crafted to suit a certain group of people or situation. And then there are the traditions that sneak up on you, that you may not even notice have been granted “tradition status” until you find them missing one year. We recently discovered that preschool artwork falls into the sneaky tradition category for us.

My son, Tyrian, was the first to enter preschool four years ago. He produced seasonal crafts that would come home regularly, we displayed them for a while and then they went into a box. By his second year, I recognized the rhythm to the crafts, made some mental notes about how Tyrian’s maturing fine motor skills were evident from one year to the next, but I still mostly displayed the art as a token of support. I didn’t have emotional connections to the pieces.

Tyrian moved on to Kindergarten and continued crafting, although usually his creations did not come home until the target holiday was over so displaying them didn’t make much sense. We stored his favorites and are bringing them out this year at the appropriate season. So far he has greeted most of the unburied treasures by saying, “Why did you put that up? I made it in Kindergarten.”

I have been so busy following my son’s journey through school craft projects that I initially didn’t notice that my daughter, Allyndreth, had taken careful notes on what her brother had made in preschool, when he had made it and when she was supposed to make it. Allyndreth is two years younger than Tyrian and started preschool right after he left.

Our first crafting crisis came last Advent season. For two years, my son had made an advent chain of red and green strips of paper leading up to a Christmas bell. We were instructed to tear off a loop for each day of December until the 25th. Our family decided to give the ritual a little more weight, so each day we wrote on the strip of paper something for which the children were thankful. We then taped these strips to the wall so that as the chain was depleting, our gratitude ladder was growing.

But last year, Allyndreth’s class did not make an Advent chain. Its absence was the trigger that caused us to realize we had started a tradition. My husband and I stayed up late on the night of November 30 making two Advent chains to have ready for our children when they woke up on December 1. We were already planning our private Advent chain party for this year when to my relief, Allyndreth came home with an Advent chain from school a full five days early. Glory Hallelujah! Now I just had to make one for my son and our Advent was saved!

Our second crafting crisis came during November of this year. As the leaves turned from green to orange, Allyndreth started talking about making her hand turkey at school. I learned that for Allyndreth, the quintessential craft of her first year in preschool was the hand turkey – a tracing of her open hand on autumn-colored construction paper with feathers glued into each finger slot. An eye placed strategically in the thumb and a small bric-a-brac wattle glued off the tip of the thumb and you’re all set.

Allyndreth was sick the first week of November and fought hard not to stay home from school. When I learned that she was afraid she would miss the hand turkey project, I called her teacher, Miss Susie, and alerted her to the importance of the hand turkey. Miss Susie said they would not be doing hand turkeys while Allyndreth was out. Thanksgiving came early this year. When we were healthy enough to go to school the second week of November, I was certain that this would be the week Allyndreth would make her hand turkey. After all, there were only precious few days before Thanksgiving break.

The days ticked by. No hand turkeys came home. Everyday, Allyndreth went to school and hoped aloud that THIS would be the day they made hand turkeys. By the end of the week, I figured I had to stick my nose into Miss Susie’s lesson planning. As innocently as possible, I asked Miss Susie when they would be making hand turkeys this year. She replied they were going to do some other turkey projects this year. I must have gone pale because she looked at me with great concern. I asked if, by any chance, Allyndreth could privately make a hand turkey. Miss Susie immediately understood the seriousness of the situation and said she’d be happy to pull Allyndreth aside to make a turkey. Three hours later, when I picked Allyndreth up, she came out proudly displaying her Hand Turkey 2007 and Miss Susie said several of the children expressed that they were feeling bereft of hand turkeys and had joined in the fun.

Next year, Allyndreth starts Kindergarten and the amount of crafts she produces will begin to decline. My son, now in first grade, is doing almost no seasonal crafting at school while his attention turns to less-crafty academic pursuits. As I packed up Thanksgiving decorations last weekend, I sighed a little to think that this was probably our last year with a new hand turkey added to our collection. To be honest, I never even saved Tyrian’s hand turkeys from preschool because I was too ignorant to realize I would want to use them again and again as part of our Thanksgiving ambience. He made me a few this year, but he made them with the skill of a seven-year-old, not the whimsy of a preschooler. They are lovely, but not quite the same.

Allyndreth has six more months of preschool and I now know to savor each craft for the time capsule that it is, and for the tradition of fine art that has crept into my life.

As Thanksgiving weekend draws to a close and the December holiday season is on the horizon, thoughts turn to gift giving and, sorry to be crass, gift receiving. I get my holiday shopping done before Halloween as a rule, so I sail through the gift giving. What I tend to fixate on is the gift receiving. I’m not a goods hungry greed monster. In fact, I tell loved ones I don’t need any gifts (which doesn’t work, by the way). Instead, I obsess about finding the time and creativity to write thank-you notes.

I have written before about making the art for my own thank-you cards (“Art is in the Cards”). And I have written about how my kids design their own stationery for thank-you notes (“Teach Kids an Artistic Way to Say Thank You”) I’m a fanatic about thank-you notes year round, but especially at holiday time. My kids have participated in thanking folks themselves for gifts since they could speak only a few words to dictate a basic “thank you.” They always provide the artwork for unique cards, and every year they have been able to write more and more of the message themselves. It has become a tradition in our family, on December 26, to sit around the dining room table and do our thank-you notes. To make it festive, we each get to eat a Christmas cookie every time we finish a note. It’s the only day of the year I let the kids (or myself) gorge, and it makes the job fun.

You can imagine my delight when I learned of a local non-profit organization, Creek Kids Care, which uses children’s art to make stationery to sell and raise money for worthy causes. When I first saw the product, I bought three packs immediately, which we are rapidly depleting as the whole family uses them to write thank-you notes and letters to friends and family. It a tremendous feeling to support the arts, children’s creativity, charity and the importance of gratitude all with one note card.

Creek Kids Care began in Walnut Creek, CA as a way for kids to use their creativity and time to make a difference in the world. It started because two children were concerned about the wellbeing of one local homeless man. Since its inception in 2004, Creek Kids Care has grown to over 150 families, generating more than $12,000 in donations for Fresh Start Walnut Creek, JF Kapnek Trust and Tsunami Relief. All the stationery is assembled by kids using the artwork of other kids. Recently, Creek Kids Care has started to use the artwork to make and sell clear glass magnets called Touchstones. Their Web site gives more details about the organizations they support.

The Creek Kids Care mission statement says all you need to know about this organization:

“Creek Kids Care is a non-profit organization made up of concerned and hopeful Walnut Creek children and teens who believe their time, creativity and effort can make a difference in the world. Using the donated proceeds from their artistic creations, CKC raises funds that help improve the well being of children, adults and families in need, both locally and internationally. Every product is created by the kids.”

The Creek Kids Care Web site is worth exploring, especially because you can see their vibrant products and purchase them. The site explains how the stationery is born during periodic Art Parties. Children aged preschool and up participate in mixed media gathering where their creativity is encouraged to run wild to produce the original pieces used for the note cards. The intention is to make something beautiful in order to help make someone else’s life easier. Older children gather to assemble the note cards, pasting the original artwork onto blank cards, gathering them into groups of 10 with envelopes and simply tying raffia around the stack for a visually appealing display.

With the note cards comes a small insert explaining the purpose of Creek Kids Care. Among the ideas I have already mentioned, it says:

“Children show their vitality and their imagination through their artwork. Giving their artwork away to loved ones and seeing their creation appreciated and displayed is a meaningful way for children to share themselves and their love.”

I could not have written that statement any better. I am not at all involved with Creek Kids Care, although it seems like I should be. I wonder why I didn’t come up with the idea myself, actually. This holiday season, my family will be giving away the creativity of Creek Kids Care when we do our thank-you notes. Admittedly, we’re straying a little from our own homemade art approach, but I can’t think of a better way to impart the humanity of the season than by promoting the multifaceted ideals of some caring and clever local children.