Tuesday, December 06, 2011

Another example of how I do it all wrong

Yesterday, ESK and I took a few minutes to tour our local Hospice's Festival of Trees. ESK is one of those humans who usually really likes Christmas, and this year she isn't feeling it. I kinda worry that it might be my fault. I'm not really a Christmas sort of monkey. So, I've been trying to bring back her cheer. While looking at the trees, we realized that the way we would fail at decorating a Festival of Trees tree is that we'd decide that all the ornaments had to be handcrafted and we would spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars and every waking moment fashioning elaborate decorations . . . and our tree wouldn't stand out against the florist who wrapped his tree in 3 types of ribbon and stuck feathers in the top.

And, now NPR has given me another example of how I will never really be one of those truly successful humans (although, I've set the bar pretty high for monkeys). They ran this story about entertaining with Martha Stewart. Now, I can pull together a theme like no one's business. The thing that struck me is half way down the page. Go ahead, look . . . see the nativity scene? The one she crafted while in prison? The one that required her to go without comforts so she could buy the bits of clay she needed to create the nativity? Yeah.

If I found myself in federal prison for 5 months, I'm pretty sure I'd spend that time writing 15-year-old-girl bad poetry and crying. Not hand crafting a family heirloom that I'll later use to display in publications that will earn me thousands upon thousands of dollars as a show of my ability to survive and create something beautiful out of an experience most folks would never speak of again.

And, that's how I do it all wrong.

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