Manic Monday - Ornament

This week’s Manic Monday word is ornament. This is actually an issue that has been causing me a lot of problems this year.

Eli is really into the tree decorating this year, and really wanted to make cookie ornaments that you see in magazines like Martha Stewart Living. Dude! I am sooooo not Martha Stewart. I tried to do the cookie ornaments one year, and they did not turn out. First, I discovered that you have to be good at decorating cookies. Second, I found that it takes a lot of patience. I was pretty much screwed on both fronts.

I make some kick-ass frosting, but my decorating skills consist of adding green food coloring and slapping it on a tree-shaped cookie. If I’m feeling really ambitious, I may dot the cookie with some red hots.

When you make cookie ornaments, it requires a little more skill. Even following the detailed instructions, my cookies were big globs. They looked like a snowman through up on them. After they were done, I realized that you were supposed to put the holes in the tops of the cookies before baking. Well, double crap. Just for the record, it is really difficult to try to poke holes in the cookies after baking without the cookies breaking.

After that experience, I decided the cookie ornaments were out. Eli’s second choice was to decorate the tree with candy canes. That sounded easy and economical – right up my alley! We went out and loaded up on candy canes and put them all on the tree when Georgia was napping. When she woke up, she thought she was in a Candyland paradise. She kept taking all of the candy canes off the tree and eating them. I have never seen a child unwrap a candy cane so fast. She even took some candy canes and hid them around the house so she could have them later. She must have been a dog in a previous life.

Once we decided that candy canes weren’t going to work, we just went with regular ornaments. Unfortunately, those attract Georgia, too. So our tree now has our beautiful ornaments clustered together near the upper portion of the tree. The bottom two-thirds of the tree simply has the lights. Fa la la la la.

As if that weren’t enough, my two best friends, Stacey and Andrea, decided we should just exchange ornaments this year instead of gifts since we are all strapped for cash. That sounded like a great idea in theory until I was standing in Target for 30 minutes trying to choose ornaments that represented my friends in some way. The children were getting very riled up, and Eric was yelling at me to “just pick two!!” I finally did, and I thought they were cool.

Stacey and Andrea and I got together the other night. When I opened Andrea’s gift, I thought, “oh crap.” It wasn’t a $5 ornament from Target. It was a homemade ornament with a college picture of the three of us in the middle that said “17 years of friendship.” I absolutely love it, but this made me realize that I have a lot to shoot for next year!