Oh Christmas Thing 2009

Christmas decorating came early and inadvertently this year.  Shortly after my open studio in Sept, I did some shuffling here, a little shifting there and before I knew it, voila!, this year's Christmas Thing was very magically born.  It's a good thing too.  I knew after last year that I needed to step away from the crutch of garland and lights to formulate my annual yuletide alter of the mundane.  Although I adore the scent of real garland, and real Christmas trees, I needed to go deeper to formulate the emblems of my Christmases to come.  This year's specimen is a real contender in my mind.
As you can gather from this and previous years' Christmas Things, I don't necessarily strain myself in the fabrication of these yuletide alters. I'm no Clark Griswold. 
But as with any other expression of seasonal cheer, these pieces elevate some designated niche filled with any ordained collection of items to a position that is worthy of gazing upon and projecting upon, any personally held notions of peace, family, giving, or crass commercialization that one attributes to this festive season. 

These amalgamations and the spirit with which I view their creation are as dear to me as any of those memories of the natural or artificial, flocked or not Christmas trees, garlands, tangles of lights and copious amounts of baked goodness of my Christmases past.

There's much about the Christmas season from which I have worked to sequester myself, but those aspects that I do relish; the atmosphere (physical, ethereal, and nostalgic), the taint of expectation, the sense of specialness that is attributed to certain gestures be they grand or not are the things I respond to.  Those are the abstractions (the good things)  formed at the fringe of this massive stress-filled hustle-bustle, overindulged merchandised moment.  And for me, for this moment, these Ritz boxes, that flattened Miller Lite 6 pack carrier, that polka dot sunglass case I found on the street, that stack of cardboard pallet feet from the packaging of our Ikea sofa and that spiral of Astroturf scrap are all imbued with those wonderful notions that waft in on gentle holiday currents.