The Christmas Cards

One of my coworkers wondered recently if distributing Christmas cards designed by her four-year-old daughter would be deemed cute or nauseating.  She could not decide if the card recipients would think she was forcing her daughter's art upon them and she would thus be deemed a compliment-fisher.

This may come as a surprise, but I don't usually have an opinion about most things; I tend to see both sides of most issues.  It's not that I don't care - it's probably just that I'm a Libra.  Also, sometimes, yes, I truly don't care.

But not when it comes to Christmas cards!  Of course my coworker should have her child create her cards.  I didn't have to debate for one second about this issue.  Sandy H. used to have the three of us design our family Christmas cards.  She didn't have to wonder if people would think she was fishing for fake compliments because she knew that we were all immensely talented.  Obviously, my children will be truly artistically gifted if they are borne from me, and I won't think twice about forcing a pen in their chubby little hands the millisecond they develop any sort of motor skills and seeing if any Christmassy-looking item appears on the page.

We lost all the samples of our old Christmas cards in Katrina, but the memory of one of the earliest copies stands out in my mind.  Randy, around age 10, drew a gorgeous set of three wise men that looked almost exactly like this:

Brooke, probably around age 5, was assigned the daunting task of drawing the manger scene.  What she drew came out looking like this:

As the resident three-year-old, I was a girl who knew what I wanted.  And I didn't want to do what I didn't want to do.  And what I didn't want to do was draw anything that was not a candy cane.

They tried to stop me.  They tried to tell me the candy cane didn't belong in the nativity scene.  I didn't give a fuck.

I wanted to draw a fucking candy cane and no one was going to stop me.

So the final result looked pretty much like this: