‘Tis the season for… chaos

When I was a kid every day on the road to Christmas Day felt like an eternity. It was always stinking hot and my little sister (Sister Sledge) and I used to amuse ourselves with activities such as riding our bikes past the neighbours' house on the corner (the only one with the pool in the street) and shouting to each other, “OH, IT’S SOOOOOOO HOT!” in the hope that our passive aggressiveness would yield us a swim in the pool. It usually did! 

And on one particularly long and languid pre-Christmas December Day in the 80s, Sister Sledge and I took the bikes for a spin down to the corner shop to buy craft materials – to cut into miniscule pieces – to create a Mr. Squiggle board game.  Yep, the days were very, very long!

What I don’t remember is when the days switched from being long, hot and languid to frantic, air-conditioned and chaotic? When did I stop lying on my stomach, creating a board game, in the middle of the lounge room for an entire day, and start trying to cram multiple events on every given day in the lead up to Christmas?

I only have one husband and two children and yet I feel like I am project managing a large corporation. Between my work and Pineman’s work and day care and pre-school and school orientations and birthday parties and Christmas parties and more Christmas parties and Christmas shopping, I am starting to feel like I’m on a conveyor belt which is creeping toward some dark and ominous pit and inside the pit are metres and metres of tinsel and an inflatable Santa.

 I am quite debilitated by the chaos this year. And my coping mechanism seems to be: inane shopping expeditions and popping ibuprofen (in no particular order).

I used to be quite a productive Christmas shopper, but this year, in the small amount of time I have had to shop, I have been faffing about, coming home with random items and forgetting things like the milk.

The other day it took me at least 45 minutes to walk from the bike section of Toys R Us to the end of ONE car aisle. It was not a great distance, but this is what I achieved in the process: I bumped into someone I knew and had a chat. Waited whilst The Ranga drove a large plastic car around. Idly threatened said child out of large plastic car. Waited whilst The Ranga AND Miss C drove large plastic cars around. Idly threatened said children out of large plastic cars. Was accosted by woman wanting to know all about electronic guinea pigs. Delivered winning sales pitch to not one but THREE women regarding electronic guinea pigs and up-sold matching accessories. Witnessed a little boy piss himself all over his bewildered father and the floor. Offered all spare wipes, pull-ups and shorts to bewildered father who had a little boy, a baby, a pram and NO nappy bag! Dictated the makes and models of the entire range of Matchbox cars to the eager Ranga, then promptly forgot why I was there and walked out with nothing!    

 I have also found myself getting all antsy when I can’t find particular items, begging shop assistants to just check one more time please, trying to materialise a Jessie and Bullseye (from Toy Story 3) double pack when I know full well that Jessie on her own would be quite adequate. And having loud conversations on my mobile in aisles that sound like this, “DO YOU THINK THE RANGA WOULD LIKE A STAR WARS DOUBLE PACK WITH R2D2 and C3PO WITH A BATTLE DROID HEAD? NO, IT HAS AN INTERCHANGEABLE C3PO HEAD. NO, IT’S NOT FROM THE ORIGINAL TRILOGY, BUT DO YOU THINK HE WOULD LIKE IT??”

If I have achieved nothing else this Christmas, I’m pretty sure I gave the poindexter father in the aisle next to me an erection.

But it’s not really the kids’ presents that pose the greatest problems, it’s all the tricky gifts like those for pre-school teachers and day care teachers and ballet teachers and even when they have been carefully selected, Miss C wants to value add with some homemade craft. I commend her for her thoughtfulness, I really do (season of giving and all). But her idea this year is to make individual paper doily people for her pre-school teachers, which involves glue and pom poms and large paddle pop sticks and cutting and pipe cleaners and oh my GOD, between that and the writing of Christmas cards when she cannot yet write, is causing me to reach for the ibuprofen quicker than Frosty the friggin’ Snowman can meet his demise in the Australian sun.  

We are eight days into December and we haven’t even put up the tree!! This never would’ve happened when I was a kid. The tree went up on the first day of December, and Mum would’ve patiently encouraged the Mr Squiggle board game craft. Hell, she would’ve even cracked open the glue! I don’t remember my parents being this harried around Christmas (although my mother did line up at a shop at midnight on Christmas Eve 1984 to secure a Cabbage Patch Kid for me – I’m sure that was relaxing). Maybe they were and I just didn’t notice? Maybe my kids won’t notice?

Mister Maker has a lot to answer for!

I understand the value of kids and The Creative Arts. I really do. I studied music, art, and drama at school and have been known to break out in spontaneous song and dance numbers when the mood strikes me.

My husband (otherwise known as Pineman due to a questionable haircut that left him resembling the fronds on a pineapple) is not particularly dramatic but is incredibly musical and artistic, so I realise we must accept some responsibility for our kids’ artistic temperaments.

However, I think someone else needs to take some responsibility for our children’s manic craft episodes, and that is a British television show host who sports a zany vest, has crazy eyes, and fashions crafty things out of inanimate objects from his ‘doodle drawers’.  He paints, he sticks, he glues, he cuts, and somewhere in the middle of the program he wakes up some shapes that jump down from a shelf and sing, “I am a shape…la la la la”. 

He is Mister Maker, and he is an enabler!

At one stage my kids were so enamoured with Mister Maker that we had to record the show daily. They even assigned a shape to everyone in the family, and if I happened to be in the room at the wrong time, I had to be a square.

But it’s the way their little eyes light up when they see a ‘fake spilt milkshake’ being created using pink paint mixed with glue or a ‘donkey puppet’ made by sticking two boxes together and then plastered with paint, pom poms and googly eyes, that incites me to throw all easily accessible art products on a Very High Shelf.

Apologies in advance to my high school art teacher, but the three core reasons for my disdain for children’s Visual Arts are as follows:

Visual Arts are messy.

During The Ranga’s recent pre-school orientation session, he gravitated towards the painting table, and with a furrowed brow, started furiously striking the paper with the intensity of Vincent Van Gough. He layered and layered and layered and added A LOT of water from the rinsing cup and produced the masterpiece, ‘Anakin’s Footprints’, which looked suspiciously like his previous series, ‘Stars and Rope’.

Later when trying to wrangle two wet paintings, a backpack, a pair of shoes and the rescuing of The Ranga from a giant bindi patch, I copped the full force of a dripping ‘Anakin’s Footprints’ in the face; which brings me to my next point…

Visual Arts are hard to transport.

As much as I adore pre-schools and day care centres for allowing my children to creatively express themselves without my presence, they really need to consider leasing trailers.

Miss C recently brought home FOUR egg cartons containing the inside padding from a bra (apparently beds for her dolls), two paintings, two drawings and two cardboard boxes covered in paint and glitter stuck together with an empty paper towel roll and some painted yoghurt containers (apparently a boat).

And once when it was pouring rain, I had to haul a saturated Ranga, a pair of sodden thongs, a handbag, a backpack, seventeen drawings, and a pair of cardboard and cotton wool bunny ears. Plus, Miss C had to trail behind toting an umbrella, a wet painting, and a toy chicken in a basket made out of an egg carton and a pipe cleaner.

Trailer anyone?

And sometimes the art just keeps on travelling with us…like Miss C’s paper doily people who have to be strapped into the car and attend her ballet lessons.

But possibly art’s most heinous crime is its prevalence!

Visual Arts are like The Plague.

My kids never stop creating and it’s like some insidious disease that has infiltrated the house.

Despite my best intentions to follow the advice of every parent and magazine and book with their ‘great ideas’ about displaying/storing/using children’s artworks - turn it into wrapping paper, take photos of the art and make a photo book, create a crafty display wall (which would involve me creating craft to store the craft!), frame it - to the parent of the prolific artist, it is all bullshit!

I have saved some, framed three pieces for Miss C to hang in her room, stuck them to the fridge, made numerous, subtle trips to the recycling bin, and yet we are still destined to be like one of those families who have to be rescued by a bulldozer and a team of cleaners and a television crew because we have horded so much crap.

The moral to the story…

I can tolerate The Ranga’s made-up songs about Star Wars characters to the tune of Train’s Save Me San Francisco for ten straight minutes, followed by a cry of, “Mum, I can feel another song coming on”.

I can even tolerate Miss C dressing up in a petticoat I wore as a flower girl in a debutante ball when I was nine, coupled with an old bikini top, and dragging herself along the ground pretending to be Ariel from The Little Mermaid.

But the next time I hear the theme song to Mister Maker, please allow me to rock in the corner and silently weep.