Tragedy of hand made proportions

Once again, it is time for the holidays-and like all the years before this one, I am faced with an important decision that demands the utmost in decisive thinking and cohesive planning.

The decision being: do I want to step up to the metaphorical creative plate and send out hand made holidays cards or should I just take the easy way out and hop on board the good ship "store bought"?

For most people, store bought is the only way to go; and, if I had any sense at all, I would go with them; however, at some point during my formative years I got it into my head that I was indeed, a creative genius. And, it was from this gross misassessment that I began to feel like it was my duty to share my gifts with the rest of the world (or at least with the people whose addresses I had scribbled into my Hello Kitty address book).

Unfortunately, the completely unsubstantiated high regard through which I view my creative abilities has never actually developed into any kind of real talent (although in my defense, it is hard to come up with spectacular greetings cards with a budget that limits you to a hybrid medium of glitter, glue and construction paper), so the card I ultimately come up with, never matches the one I had imagined in my mind.

Truly, it is a disappointing cycle; however, being the glutton for punishment that I have always been, I have decided to go the handmade route yet again this year. This leads me to the next step in the hand made efforts which boils down to the concepts of "design." In an effort to avoid the glitter clean-up of last year's "Jack Handy Valentine's Day" cards; I desperately turned to my mother's Home Journal magazines in hopes of finding inspiration (or better yet, step-by-step instructions for a card idea which I could easily duplicate and then take all the credit for). After paging through a seemingly endless sea of menopause ads and articles on breast feeding, I managed to find a card concept that hypothetically would allow me make lovely designs in paper with some colorful yarn and a big needle.

I thought I had stuck gold.

However, after having spent the past 7 nights in a sewing frenzy-with nothing to show for my efforts but three crappy cards that look like the arts and crafts equivalent of something Santa's Special Olympic elves would create; frankly, I am an embarrassment to my cause and well, store bought it is.