Grandma Woodcock moved in with us when I was 12, and noticing I liked to write, declared that everyone has at least one good book in them.
“Yours,” she added, “should be about me.”
I get it now. She was pushing 70, had a bad heart, and wanted to be sure that after she passed on, she wouldn’t be forgotten. She needn’t have worried.
Like everyone who has a flair for making crafts, Grandma had scissored, knitted and glued her way to immortality. I tell myself that even without the book, her left-behinds tell her signature story: that it was honorable to “make something out of nothing.”
The value of her something-making became clear a couple of years ago when I moved to a smaller house. Knowing that my 112-pound monstrosity of a Christmas tree would not be coming along, I pawed through boxes of Grandma’s homemade ornaments in an effort to pare down the collection.
All those cute hand-knitted bells from red, green and white yarn remnants! The seven-inch doll with orange yarn pig-tails! The wooden spools of thread tied up with plastic holly! I could not part with a single one. And the Santa’s sleigh she’d made by hand…well, it was falling apart, but I’d just keep patching it up and putting it under the tree. How could I not?
All these creations feel important because they bring back happy memories of early childhood visits to her craft room in Florida – one of two bedrooms in the tiny apartment she’d shared with Grandaddy. Instead of a bed, it had housed her “craft table,” a giant sheet of plywood balanced on gray concrete blocks.
On the table, she’d done her own gluing and cutting, and best of all, she’d invited each visiting child to make ornaments by cutting bright scraps of felt and holding them together with Duco cement.
Not surprisingly, over the years these memories and her something-from-nothing tradition have inspired me and my three children to make even more. In the ornament box are little mitten ornaments I’d sewn and hung with red yarn, paper chains my older son made 45 years ago, the younger one’s oven-baked Virgin Mary, and my daughter’s potpourri apple ornament made from wilting discounted roses from Kroger. Grandma would be proud.
The only complication this year is the sleigh, and that’s the dilemma. It has a history.
She used birch bark from her native New England to make one for each of her three daughters. Each was pulled by eight tiny shell-and-pipe-cleaner reindeers and a red-nosed Rudolph. The sleigh she gave my mother featured a Santa made from red yarn shouldering a red-yarn pack of toys, notably a pink plastic angel playing a violin. The only child, I naturally inherited it and have been trying to hold it together for over 15 years.
During this time, the reindeer have lost some of their tiny coral antlers. The pink angel violinist was lost in an earlier move. The pipe cleaners have rusted and become weak in the knees.
Every trip to Florida, I’ve scoured funky gift shops in search of coral tiny enough to make replacement antlers. No luck. A few years ago, I enlisted my granddaughter. A clever crafter herself, she replaced the missing antlers with masking tape. She grabbed a tiny Lego to replace the lost angel. Good enough, for a few seasons. And I reveled in how much Grandma would admire this obviously inherited talent.
This year, the tiny deer legs have collapsed under the weight of time and if Grandma had also given them tongues, I’m sure they would be hanging out after at least 70 trips from the North Pole. The whole crew is sprawling along their birch bark bottom.
I’ll give my grandson one last chance at the salvage effort. He did, after all, make me a lovely bright blue wooden ornament last year from a wood scrap. But there will be no guilt if he cannot bring the birch bark sleigh back to life.
Maybe we can at least wrest Santa from his long-held perch and dangle him from a branch – the final chapter in the book Grandma wrote for herself.
Copyright 2022 Pat Snyder
