Post-Christmas week brings back crafty memories

This week between Christmas and New Year’s Day — a time when we seem to take a collective sigh of relief — always makes me think back to the late Decembers of my youth.

I was never a particularly crafty child (in the Hobby Lobby sense of the word), but I usually received at least one gift that enabled me to create completely useless items to be foisted off onto others. Two stick in my mind.

In a display of highly questionable judgment, Santa brought me a knitting machine one year. This gadget had a stupefying array of working parts. It was designed to allow inept children, aided by frustrated parents, to turn skeins of perfectly good yarn into dreadfully lumpy scarves and hats that I’m quite certain never saw the light of day after the polite (albeit it mortified) “For me? Oh, um, thanks.”

The only thing that kept me out of full scale production was this machine’s propensity to jam every 30 to 45 seconds. Looking back with the hindsight of a parent, I now wonder if I eventually abandoned this device out of sheer aggravation or if (and this seems the most likely scenario) my parents slipped it out of the house during the night to pulverize it with a sledge hammer.

Either way, my knitting factory came to a close, to be replaced at a subsequent Christmas by a candle-making kit. My kit came with a mammoth block of paraffin — I remember putting it on the cutting board in our kitchen and using a massive wooden-handled butcher knife to hack off chunks to melt. (Please note that I am not endorsing either candle-making kits or small children yielding over-sized cutlery.)

The kit had a spool of thick string to be chopped into pieces for wicks, a form for transforming hot wax into a whimsical toadstool shape, and several tiny cups of chalky, decorative paint that started to peel and flake away within minutes after it dried. (To be fair, one might argue that wax was not meant to be painted.)

I churned out toadstool candles like nobody’s business, and don’t remember being even remotely concerned that they were both wobbly and top-heavy … clearly capable of toppling over and igniting fires.

I gave them to everyone I knew, and I especially remember pressing one into the hands of my beloved Aunt Jo and Uncle Fred in Albuquerque. It went straight to an already crammed knick-knack shelf in their living room. Every visit for years afterward I would beeline to that shelf to make sure they still had it. It was there, the layer of dust growing thicker with time, the list to one side more evident with each visit, the flakes of paint heaped around its topsy-turvy base. After my aunt passed away, my uncle remarried, and after he passed away, I like to believe that his second wife had the good sense to send it to the dumpster.

If your post-Christmas week is filled with crafty projects, I wish you well. And if by chance you still have one of my scarves or toadstool candles, please consider this long overdue permission to throw it out.

Betty Williamson has no projects whatsoever under way this week. You may reach her at:

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