Almost the whole year of 2006 gone – whoosh! Before it gets away totally, and in keeping with “taking time to smell the roses”, I I treated myself, son Tommy and old friend John to champagne brunch at Hotel Intercontinental for Christmas day. Talk about a lot of good food! It’s great when someone else is doing the cooking and cleaning up. Here we are in a quick candid shot taken by one of our attentive servers.

This month slipped by and I really never got into the holiday decorating or cooking mode. I did get up to the attic though, when looking for my old Christmas cookie cutters while thinking of ideas of a family holiday cookie recipe to contribute to Tink Boord-Dill’s Holiday Bake Along. (You’ll see that I ended up submitting an easy drop meringue cookie recipe. The cookie cutters will have to wait until next year when I have more time (maybe?).

Anyway, while in the attic, I spied one of the hand-crafted holiday decorations that my Mom had made. This particular piece has always had a special place in my heart, and is especially special now that my Mom is no longer on this earth.

It is a Christmas tree in long needlepoint stitches using acrylic yarn on plastic canvas, embellished with foil baubles and plastic beads. Not something that I would do, but my Mom loved this kind of thing and was always generous in gifting me and my other two sisters with the fruits of her love and labor. I sometimes would lightly chide her about the quality of the materials she’d use, but she enjoyed what she was doing with what she had.

Now, I probably should have been more selective in which holiday decorations I store in the attic. Although the attic is walk-in off my second floor studio, vented and has an automatic fan that kicks on above a set temperature, our New Orleans heat can really build up!

You’ve probably guessed it — when I picked up the decoration, the clear plastic canvas backing started crumbling into pieces. Fortunately the opaque green canvas and all the stitching is still in place. It just goes to show us that we need to pay attention to the quality of the materials we use in our artistic creations, as well as pay attention to the care and keeping of things that we’ve invested our time in.

Otherwise time and our handcrafts may just crumble away.

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